Toni Morrison's Lorain

Description

The Lorain Public Library's Toni Morrison Room was officially completed and more than 200 people including the writer celebrate the dedication of the room on January 22, 1995. Joan M. Mazzolini's article was published on the next day of the celebration in the Plain Dealer.

LORAIN — Having a street or building named after her did not interest Lorain native Toni Morrison.

Instead, the 63-year-old Pulitzer and Nobel prize-winning author asked that the Lorain Public Library build a reading room.

“Not this building, but the Lorain Public Library was so important to me,” Morrison said yesterday at the room’s dedication. “I spent long, long hours reading.”

Morrison said she hoped the new room, which houses both her numerous works and also periodicals, would draw readers.

“To be able to sit down, in what I hope would be comfortable chairs, and spend 45 minutes or an hour quietly reading [books]. In them lies the real knowledge,” she said.

Library director Kenneth Cromer said the room would be “an inspiration for younger generations of writers.”

One such young writer was on hand for the dedication yesterday.

Lorain native Tiara Burnett, a Kent State University student, read three of her own poems. Her poem, “At the Back of the Bus,” with its final line, “Will our people always remain at the back of the bus?” was dedicated to Morrison, her mentor and idol.

Author and poet Sonia Sanchez, yesterday’s keynote speaker, recited a poem she wrote in tribute to Morrison.

The readings drew loud applause from the 200 or so who came to celebrate the dedication of the room, including Morrison’s sister, Lois Brooks, who still lives in Lorain.

Other childhood friends from Lorain showed up to see Morrison, including Connie Jellison Stewart. Stewart brought along Morrison’s picture from Lorain High School in hopes of getting it autographed.

Morrison wanted to get a copy of the photo, saying that most of her pictures were destroyed when her Hudson River retreat house burned on Christmas Day 1993.

When Morrison won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993, she became the first African-American to receive the honor and only the eighth woman. She has been a professor of humanities at Princeton University since 1989.

The Nord Family Foundation funded the renovations for the Toni Morrison Reading Room.