Ntozake Shange Credit: Barnard College; digitally restored by Chris Woodrich, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Poetry, song, and dance come together at one of St. Pete’s most beloved venues for a performance of Ntozake Shange’s collection of poetic monologues, “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf” (stylized in all-lowercase).

The work centers around ladies in seven colors and utilizes 20 poems to tell stories about loss, love, struggle, power (the absence of all those things) in unflinching fashion (CW: the work discusses rape and DV).

First staged 51 years ago, the choreopoem by Shange comes to life in St. Petersburg at the hands of playwright, USF faculty member and alumna Fanni Green.

Tickets for the staged reading of ‘“For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf’ happening Thursday-Friday, March 13-14 at St. Pete’s Studio@620 are still available for $20.Readers are invited to submit their own events to Creative Loafing Tampa Bay’s things to do calendar.

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This article appears in Mar 6-12, 2025.