Sometimes you start reading something and you don't know why, but it strikes you in just the right way, and you know it's going to impact your life greatly. That's what I experienced when I first read Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon" nearly a year ago. Someone like Morrison can write in a way that makes you think about things in new and exciting ways. Because of Morrison, I spent over 200 hours on a research project that I still haven't fully completed. It's an ongoing project that made me think harder about life and about literature than I ever had before.

Morrison's writing brought me to a small literature conference nearly 1,000 miles away from home, where I got to share my ideas with like-minded individuals that I would have never met if it weren't for her work.

Toni Morrison leaves a legacy for African American writers (and all writers, for that matter) for centuries to come. I often think of how sad I will be when she passes away. After spending so much time getting to know her through extensive research, she's the like the grandmother I never had.

She's more talented than most people could wish to be. Her writing, while detailed and intentional, is also abstract and symbolic. She knows her way around words to the point where even interviews seem rehearsed, when clearly they're not. Morrison has won a Pulitzer and a Nobel prize, not to mention a handful of other awards for her stellar works.

Most known for her novel "Beloved," Morrison has struck the hearts of many with her heartbreaking and haunting narratives. "Beloved" makes you question what is real and what is not; the novel's turning point is when you discover that the child that Sethe murdered years previously is actually the woman that came to stay with them partway through the novel.

The ghostly presences in her novels prompted my research on the main character of "Song of Solomon," Milkman Dead. I wanted to figure out if these abstract concepts of life and death carried throughout her other novels. My eventual conclusion: yes, they very much do carry through.

After spending more than five months getting very close to Toni Morrison's life and works, I realized that literature would not be the same without her. She set modern (or, maybe more accurately, postmodern) precedent for ghost stories, and she definitely set groundwork for those who would eventually go on to further Civil Rights movements (ex. Black Lives Matter). She easily wrote about African American characters without making it the point of her works, like other African American authors might (which, don't get me wrong, is not a bad thing). However, she also made it obvious that the blackness of her characters was important. Particularly in "The Bluest Eye," a novel about a young black girl who desperately wants blue eyes, she makes it known that their blackness is an important part of who they are. It does not define them, but it molds them into who they are. It is not important, but it simultaneously is not unimportant.

Morrison has an uncanny ability to write in a way that doesn't seem to have been done before, and that is what is most important about her. She does not try to be anyone else. She writes what she feels, and she knows what is important to get across. Not only that, but she's unbelievably funny.

I am proud to have studied her and to continue to study her. I am excited to know her as deeply as I can, and I hope to one day pass on her legacy to generations that will have forgotten how important she was to my generation, and generations before me.