About the Book

Lorey Hayes, an original cast member of Ntozake Shange’s iconic theatrical play: For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, has adopted Shange’s Choreopoem style. From growing up in Jim Crow south to her escape to the bright lights of New York City, Lorey highlights the people, places, images and thoughts that helped shape her life as a woman of color.

Learning that she was in the original cast, Former Artistic Director, Ed Smith hired Hayes to direct For Colored Girls at The Jubilee Theater. Hayes was happy to revisit the work that Douglas Watt of the New York Daily News described as, “Overwhelming ….affirmative in the face of despair” and William A. Raidy, of the L.I.Press/Newhouse called, “an unforgettable collage of one woman’s view of the women of her race.”

Ntozake’s writings propelled Hayes to share her own passions that reveal the complexity of her life — and for that Hayes is forever grateful..