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“My relationship with Morrison lasted a third of my life and was not wholly intimate and not fully professional,” writes A.J. Verdelle MFA ’93 in Miss Chloe: A Memoir of a Literary Friendship with Toni Morrison. The Los Angeles Review of Books says Verdelle’s new book “creates an echo chamber that deftly evokes the voice of Toni Morrison,” and, for the reviewer, it served as an introduction to Verdelle’s work more broadly. “The book had grabbed me from the first page,” writes Wayne Catan. “Not only because Verdelle pulls back the curtain to display the duo’s intimate life together, but because of Verdelle’s engaging prose.” Miss Chloe not only chronicles Verdelle’s friendship with Morrison, whose birth name, Chloe A. Wofford, gives the book its title, but is threaded with reflections on Verdelle’s own childhood, her racist experiences in Catholic school, and “discussions of craft as seen through Morrison’s eyes.” Verdelle draws lessons, both personal and professional, from Morrison, including how to live in the world as a Black author. “Rather than succumb to the distraction of responding to what others thought she, or we, could not be, Toni Morrison refused to race-splain,” Verdelle writes.