For colored girls who have considered fairy tales. (celebrity children's books).

Float Like a Butterfiy Story by Ntozake Shange, Illustrated by Edel Rodriguez Jump at the Sun/Hyperion September 2002 $15.99, ISBN 0-786-80554-4

In Float Like a Butterfly, playwright and novelist Ntozake Shange tells the story, in her own words, of the boxing champ's rise from his youthful years growing up in Louisville, Kentucky. The young Cassius Clay is full of determination as he asserts himself in the segregated South. Shange imagines his gift for rhyming and understanding the power of words--two qualities that would later become Ali's trademark.

The story quickly follows Cassius through his childhood, his victory at the 1960 Olympics, to his bouts for the title of heavyweight boxing champ, and his religious and spiritual transformation. There is a timeline of Ali's life at the end, and a few selected words are boldfaced as a way of expanding reader's vocabularies.

Award-winning illustrator Edel Rodriguez has created a combination of simple woodblock ink images with colorful pastels and full-page, spray paint artwork to convey Ali's energy. It works.

Ntozake Shange says she thought she was doing poetry and ritual, not theater when she first performed for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf in San Francisco, in 1973. Since then, the Obie award-winning author has written several novels, plays and yes, even children's books. She's currently a visiting professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where she's working on lavender lizards & lilac land mines, a new piece for the stage about poetry, and in it, everybody is a poet.

BIBR: Float Like a Butterfly is your latest children's book. What inspired you to write about Mahammad Ali?

NS: I was approached by editors at Hyperion to write about Muhammad Ali, and I was excited about the idea. First of all, I think Ali is a great man, a true hero in every sense of the word. And I considered it an honor to write about his life, his childhood. I'm very comfortable with boxing. You see my father was a ring physician. He'd been doing that for decades for the state of New Jersey and also when we moved to St. Louis. He was also a rodeo and circus doctor. Ali came to dinner at nag house when I was teenager, and I saw quite a different man from the macho man that everybody else saw. Not only was he impressive and intelligent, he was surprisingly soft-spoken. This project gave me a chance to honor him.

BIBR: You've now, written four children's books, which include Ellington Was Not A Street, I live in music and Whitewash. Do you enjoy writing children's books?

NS: Well, I have another one coming out in January 2003. It's called Daddy Says, and it's a story about a single father in the rodeo raising two little girls. Yes, I do enjoy writing for children. And what I enjoy most is the simplicity of the language. What I mean by simplicity is not talking down to them, presenting language that children can delve into it and not be baffled.

BIBR: What prompted your interest in writing for children?

NS: You know, I never in my life thought about writing children's books. I was astonished when people came to me and asked about doing it--I mean, here I am this big hallmark of women's sexuality. So at first I laughed because I didn't take the offer seriously.