Desdemona Book

"Ms. Morrison crafts muscular sentences that accumulate a poetic force."—The New York Times

The story of Desdemona from William Shakespeare's Othello is reimagined by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison, Malian singer and songwriter Rokia Traoré, and acclaimed stage director Peter Sellars.

Morrison's response to Sellars' 2009 production of Othello is an intimate dialogue of words and music between Desdemona and her African nurse Barbary. Morrison gives voice and depth to the female characters, letting them speak and sing in the fullness of their hearts.

Desdemona is an extraordinary narrative of words, music and song about Shakespeare's doomed heroine, who speaks from the grave about the traumas of race, class, gender, war—and the transformative power of love. Toni Morrison transports one of the most iconic, central, and disturbing treatments of race in Western culture into the new realities and potential outcomes facing a rising generation of the twenty-first century.

Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She is the author of many novels, including The Bluest Eye, Beloved (made into a major film), Paradise and, most recently, Home. She has also received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction. In addition to Desdemona her theatrical work includes writing the text for Margaret Garner (music composed by Richard Danielpour), and Dreaming Emmett an unpublished play directed by Gilbert Moses and performed at the Marketplace Capitol Repertory Theater of Albany. Morrison has written lyrics for Kathleen Battle (commissioned by Carnegie Hall), Sylvia McNair, Jessye Norman, and Andre Previn. Morrison founded the Princeton Atelier which for fifteen years has brought actors, composers, writers, and artists of all genres together to work with students on the artists' own projects. Several of her novels, including The Bluest Eye, have been adapted for the stage.