Our Favorites: Toni Morrison

Womanica

Acast Creative Studios

History, Society & Culture, Education

4.3 • 920 Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2025

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Toni Morrison (1931-2019) was a groundbreaking writer and the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Her works, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved—where she coined the word "rememory"—explore race, identity, and the legacies of slavery. Morrison's profound storytelling has made her one of the most influential voices in American literature.

For Further Reading:

For the past six years, we’ve been telling the stories of women you may or may now know– but definitely should. This month, we’re bringing back our favorite Womanica episodes from across our back catalog. These are women throughout time and around the world who made their mark.

History classes can get a bad rap, and sometimes for good reason. When we were students, we couldn’t help wondering... where were all the ladies at? Why were so many incredible stories missing from the typical curriculum? Enter, Womanica. On this Wonder Media Network podcast we explore the lives of inspiring women in history you may not know about, but definitely should.

Every weekday, listeners explore the trials, tragedies, and triumphs of groundbreaking women throughout history who have dramatically shaped the world around us. In each 5 minute episode, we’ll dive into the story behind one woman listeners may or may not know–but definitely should. These diverse women from across space and time are grouped into easily accessible and engaging monthly themes like Educators, Villains, Indigenous Storytellers, Activists, and many more. Womanica is hosted by WMN co-founder and award-winning journalist Jenny Kaplan. The bite-sized episodes pack painstakingly researched content into fun, entertaining, and addictive daily adventures.

Womanica was created by Liz Kaplan and Jenny Kaplan, executive produced by Jenny Kaplan, and produced by Grace Lynch, Maddy Foley, Brittany Martinez, Edie Allard, Carmen Borca-Carrillo, Taylor Williamson, Sara Schleede, Paloma Moreno Jimenez, Luci Jones, Abbey Delk, Adrien Behn, Alyia Yates, Vanessa Handy, Melia Agudelo, and Joia Putnoi. Special thanks to Shira Atkins.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, from Wonder Media Network, I'm Jenny Kaplan, and this is Womanica.
0:06.5	For the past six years, we've been telling the stories of women you may or may not know
0:11.6	about but definitely should. This month, we're bringing back our favorite Womanica episodes
0:16.6	from across the back catalog. These are women across centuries and around the world
0:22.0	who made their mark.
0:24.0	With that, here's one of our favorite episodes.
0:35.3	Hello, from Wonder Media Network, I'm Jenny Kaplan, and this is Womanica. This month we're talking about word weavers, people who coined terms, popularized words, and even created entirely new languages. These activists, writers, artists, and scholars used language to shape ideas and give voice to experiences that once had no name.
1:02.3	Triggered by the haunting of her murdered child, Seth that begins to confront all the trauma she repressed
1:08.0	after escaping enslavement. This is the premise of Beloved, a novel that led its author to become the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature.
1:19.8	One of the most significant contributions of Beloved is the creation of the word remember, which describes the act of recalling and confronting repressed history.
1:29.6	The novel forces readers to reckon with the ghosts of slavery, not as a past event, but as a living,
1:34.9	breathing presence in the present. Today's Womanticin wrote Beloved, as well as many other prolific
1:41.2	books. Please welcome Tony Morrison.
1:45.0	Tony Morrison was born on February 18, 1931, in Lorraine, Ohio,
1:52.0	a town that provided a strong sense of community,
1:57.0	while also exposing Tony and her family to the truths of racial segregation and economic struggles.
2:03.6	From an early age, Tony was a voracious reader and storytelling was an ingrained practice in her family.
2:09.6	She was exposed to a range of narratives from oral histories to folklore,
2:13.6	which elucidated the hard truths of black survival. In an interview later in life, Tony said,
2:20.3	As a child, I had to retell those stories to other adults.
2:23.3	The stories were pretty much horror stories about life as an African American.
2:27.3	They were powerful and highly metaphorical, but that's really what was at the bottom of it.
	...

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