YOUNGSTOWN — A love of writing punctuated Chris Barzak’s childhood, and the one-word title of the first Toni Morrison novel he read perfectly described the passion he developed for his life’s pursuit.

“A college friend introduced the book to me. When I was 18, I read ‘Beloved,'” Barzak, a Youngstown State University English and creative writing professor, recalled.

The 1987 novel “Beloved,” for which Morrison won a Pulitzer Prize, is a haunting account of slavery in post-Civil War Ohio and is told through the character of Sethe, an escaped slave who is tormented by ghostly images of her daughter who had been killed. The daughter appears as a mysterious apparition named Beloved, and the multi-themed novel explores motherhood, trauma and reclaiming oneself after having been enslaved and brutalized.

In a literary sense, Barzak, who also is director of YSU’s Poetry Center, paid it forward for Morrison when he was among those who read aloud portions of her famous 1992 novel “Jazz” during an all-day community reading of her book Wednesday in YSU’s DeBartolo Hall.

Hosting the Black History month-themed event were YSU’s Poetry Center and Poetry Club, Student Literary Arts Association, Jazz Studies program and Department of English and World Languages.

The celebratory gathering also featured a showing of the 2019 artful documentary “The Pieces I Am,” which examines Morrison’s life and work, and that preceded a discussion led by Dolores Sisco, a YSU English professor. In addition, the gathering included a one-hour jazz performance and interlude.

Also, the readings coincided with similar yearlong, statewide events, titled “Beloved: Ohio Celebrates Toni Morrison,” on what would have been the novelist’s 95th birthday.

Morrison hailed from Lorain and was a 1949 Lorain High School graduate with honors.

“It’s incredibly lyrical,” Barzak said about “Beloved.” “I wanted to be a writer early on, but I never saw anything resembling her writing.”

That novel also was challenging yet edifying for Barzak, he said, adding that he reread it five or six times and continued to learn something new from it each time.

In 2003, Morrison gave a lecture at the DeYor Performing Arts Center, downtown, as part of the university’s Skeggs Lecture Series, he continued.

Morrison’s literary masterpiece “Jazz” centers on a love triangle between characters named Joe Trace; his wife, Violet; and his 17-year-old lover, Dorcas, in 1920s Harlem. Trace shoots his lover and wife as the nonlinear narrative, with an anonymous narrator, and writing style that parallels the improvisational nature of a jazz performance, fuses the characters’ pasts in the rural South with their present lives in New York City.

In a larger sense, the novel is perhaps best known for its complex characters and look at black urban life during the Harlem Renaissance, with meandering themes that touch on obsession, violence, love, race, identity and the Great Migration of that decade.

The novel also was a followup to “Beloved.”

“I look very hard for black fiction because I want to participate in developing a canon of black work,” Morrison told the New York Times. “We’ve had the first rush of black entertainment, where blacks were writing for whites and whites were encouraging this kind of self-flagellation. Now we can get down to the craft of writing, where black people are talking to black people.”

In addition to writing, Morrison was an editor at Random House and taught at Princeton and Howard universities. At Howard, she majored in English, with a minor in Classics, and her first teaching position came in 1955 at Texas Southern University near Houston. Beginning in 1957, Morrison taught English at Howard and joined its campus writers group, where she developed a short story that was the template for her first novel.

In 1965, she moved to Syracuse, New York, to work as a textbook editor for L.W. Singer, which Random House owned. Eventually, Morrison became the latter’s first black female editor of fiction and edited works from well-known figures such as activist Angela Davis.

In 1980, she was appointed to the National Council on the Arts. Thirteen years later, she became the first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

By the late 1980s, Morrison returned to the academia world as the Robert F. Goheen professor at Princeton, where she taught African American studies, literature and creative writing before retiring in 2006.