“Words have power,” says Toni Morrison, and she would know. With a warm gleam in her eye, Morrison recalls her life growing up and how she became an author, editor, and champion of new African American literary voices. Weaving archival footage and interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis, Robert Gottlieb, Hilton Als, and many more, The Pieces I Am places the affable and articulate Pulitzer- and Nobel Peace Prize–winning author front and center, to tell her own story in her own words.

“Toni Morrison’s artistic, cultural, and historical legacies are by now firmly established, which doesn’t prevent Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am from revealing them anew and setting them out in an appreciative, and appropriate, package. An eloquent nonfiction biopic that travels creatively through the past, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ film is enlivened both by its own storytelling dexterity and by the participation of its subject, who at eighty-eight years old remains as warm, vibrant, and insightful as ever.”—Nick Schager, Variety