What moves at the margin : selected nonfiction / Toni Morrison ; edited and with an introduction by Carolyn C. Denard.

Includes index.

Family and history. A slow walk of trees (as grandmother would say), hopeless (as grandfather would say) ; She and me ; What the black woman thinks about women's lib ; A knowing so deep ; Behind the making of The black book ; Rediscovering black history ; Rootedness: the ancestor as foundation ; The site of memory -- Writers and writing. On behalf of Henry Dumas ; Preface to Deep sightings and rescue missions by Toni Cade Bambara ; James Baldwin: his voice remembered; life in his language ; Speaking of Reynolds Price ; To be a black woman: review of Portraits in fact and fiction ; The family came first: review of Labor of love, labor of sorrow ; Toni Morrison on a book she loves: Gayl Jones's Corregidora ; Going home with bitterness and joy: review of South to a very old place by Albert Murray ; On The radiance of the king by Camara Laye ; Foreword to The Harlem book of the dead ; Foreword to Writing red: an anthology of American women writers, 1930-1940 ; The fisherwoman: Introduction to A kind of rapture: photographs -- Politics and society. On the backs of blacks ; The talk of the town ; The dead of September 11 ; For a heroic writers movement ; Remarks given at the Howard University Charter Day convocation ; The future of time: literature and diminished expectations ; The dancing mind ; How can values be taught in the university ; The Nobel lecture in literature.

The commanding voice of Morrison's essays, speeches and reviews offers compelling insights into family, history, other writers and politics. The pieces span from 1971, when Morrison was an editor at Random House, to 2002, the year she won the Nobel Prize, and range from book introductions to thoughts on the nature of writing and reflections on 9/11.--From publisher description.