GAZETTE: Tell me about the book you just edited, which is due out in September.
PERRY: I was fortunate to be asked by Hachette and the Ntozake Shange estate to edit a collection of her unpublished writing. Even though Shange was so prolific, and published so much, there was still this beautiful body of material the world hadn’t seen yet.
In so many ways she followed [“A Raisin in the Sun” playwright] Lorraine Hansberry in opening doors for Black women in American theater. That felt like a wonderful connection. I also remember being in Cambridge as a kid, and my mother would always perform the Lady in Green character from [Shange’s 1976 play] “for colored girls [who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf]” at parties and the like.
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