Paule Marshall was born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn to Barbadian parents and educated at Brooklyn College (1953) and Hunter College (1955).Marshall has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of California, Berkeley, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and Yale University before holding the Helen Gould Sheppard Chair of Literature and Culture at New York University. In 1993 she received an honorary L.H.D. from Bates College. She lives in Richmond, VA.She is a MacArthur Fellow and is a past winner of the Dos Passos Prize for Literature. In 2009, She received the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award.
