Hi, I'm Lovar Burton and this is Lovar Burton Reads.

In every episode, I handpick a different piece of short fiction and I read it to you.

The only thing these stories have in common is that I love them and I hope you will too.

Today kicks off a two-part special series of episodes in which I will read one of my very favorite authors, Tony Morrison.

Tony Morrison was a Nobel laureate and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

She began her writing career relatively late in life.

She had already had careers as a wife, as a mother, as a college professor, and as an editor.

She was the first of textbooks and then moving to New York to become the first black female editor of fiction at Random House.

While she was there, she helped shape the early works of Angela Davis and Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton, among others.

When her first book, The Blueest Eye, was released in 1970, I was an impressionable 13-year-old and my worldview shifted forever from that day forward.

The story that I'm reading today and next week is one of only two short stories she ever published, though she published, of course, many more works of fiction with novels.

But a lot of people don't know about her nonfiction.

Her final two books were both in the nonfiction realm.

The source of self-regard, a collection of essays considering art, race, and identity, and the other is a collection entitled, Goodness and the Literary Imagination, which includes a lecture that she gave at Harvard Divinity School on the nature of Goodness.

How easily it's overshadowed by evil, and she also talks about why Goodness has been such a significant part of her work.

Now, today's story, Resetatif, begins in a children's home in New York State in the 1950s and explores the bond between two young girls, one black and one white as they grow up and grow older.

Now, if you've heard of this story, it could be because of the premise.

Ms. Morrison once said that it was an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races, for whom racial identity is crucial.

And Ms. Morrison beautifully, purposefully, skillfully writes these characters and this narrative so that we have no choice but to map our own experiences and inferences onto them.

Now, before I get started, I wanted to share something with you.

I was asked last fall to pay tribute to Tony Morrison at the pin America's annual gala.

And when I was first asked to give some remarks on the life and work of Tony Morrison, I was of course flattered and excited.

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