News Tip: Toni Morrison and the ‘Sheer Good Fortune’ of Missing Someone

Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison has died. Karla Holloway, a professor emerita of English at Duke who has written books about Morrison, is available for comment.

Quotes:
“In ’Sula,’ Toni Morrison wrote, ‘It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.’ The great irony of this loss is that it’s her words, even at this extraordinary moment, that are better said, better crafted, more carefully curated than any we might compose for the occasion of her passing,” says Duke University professor emerita of English Karla Holloway.

“Toni Morrison was a writer for this age, the one we know and the one we imagine. She gave us the company of her words, the clarity of her exquisite presence and a legacy of word work that is ours but for the labor of reading. It is our ‘sheer good fortune.’”

“My first book about her (‘New Dimensions’) was denied funding at first because the reviewer declared she was ’not that important a writer.’ My forthcoming novel imagines a character, Chloe Wolff, modeled on Morrison, who was born Chloe Wofford. Her stature and bearing hushes a room of chattering social divas with her ‘Ahem.’” 

Bio:
Karla Holloway is James B. Duke Professor Emerita of English and the author of “Moorings & Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women’s Literatures” and co-author of “New Dimensions of Spirituality” (with Stephanie Demetrakopolous), among other titles.
https://english.duke.edu/people/karla-holloway

For additional comment, contact Karla Holloway at:
karla.holloway@duke.edu; kfrancesca@nc.rr.com