Paule Marshall (born April 9, 1929) is an American author. She was born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn to Barbadian parents and educated at Girls High School, Brooklyn College (1953) and Hunter College (1955). Early in her career, she wrote poetry, but later returned to prose. She was chosen by Langston Hughes to accompany him on a world tour in which they both read their work, which was a boon to her career.
Marshall has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of California, Berkeley, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and Yale University before holding the Helen Gould Sheppard Chair of Literature and Culture at New York University. In 1993 she received an honorary L.H.D. from Bates College. She lives in Richmond, Va.
She is a MacArthur Fellow and is a past winner of the Dos Passos Prize for Literature. She was designated as a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library in 1994.
Marshall was inducted into the Celebrity Path at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in 2001.
Famous quotes containing the word marshall:
“Let us not succumb to nature. We will marshall the clouds and restrain tempests; we will bottle up pestilent exhalations; we will probe for earthquakes, grub them up, and give vent to the dangerous gas; we will disembowel the volcano, and extract its poison, take its seed out. We will wash water, and warm fire, and cool ice, and underprop the earth. We will teach birds to fly, and fishes to swim, and ruminants to chew the cud. It is time we looked into these things.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)