Toni Morrison died on Tuesday at the age of 88. She was the first African-American woman to win a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She also won the Pulitzer in 1988 for her work, "Beloved." Morrison was notable for her stories centering on black people and the hardships of the African-American experience. One of the writers she inspired is Ruth Ellen Kocher, a poet and associate dean at the University of Colorado Boulder.
