Alice Walker
Alice Walker (February 9, 1944-) is a poet, novelist, essayist, and activist. The youngest of eight children, Walker was born on February 9, 1944, to sharecroppers Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker in Eatonton, Georgia. Walker graduated valedictorian of her high school class in 1961. She attended Spelman College for two years before transferring to Sarah Lawrence College, graduating in 1965.
Walker married lawyer Mel Leventhal in 1967 and moved to Jackson, Mississippi. She worked for Friends of the Children of Mississippi, an early Head Start program. She also served as the writer-in-residence for Jackson State College and Tougaloo College. In 1968, Walker published her first book of poetry, Once. Shortly thereafter in 1969, she published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, the same year her daughter Rebecca was born. A second volume of poetry, Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, and her first collection of short stories, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Woman, both appeared in 1973. After moving to New York, Walker completed Meridian (1976), a novel describing the coming of age of several civil rights workers in the 1960s. In 1977, Walker divorced Leventhal and moved to California.
Walker has written numerous essays, novels, and collections of poetry. Her novel The Color Purple, published in 1982, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Walker has also served as a contributing editor of Ms. during the 1980s and founded the Wild Trees Press in 1984. Walker’s later fiction includes The Temple of My Familiar (1989), Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998), and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2005). She also released the volume of short stories The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000) and several other volumes of poetry, including Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003), A Poem Traveled Down My Arm (2003), Hard Times Require Furious Dancing (2010), and Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart (2018). Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems (1991) collects poetry from 1965 to 1990.
Walker’s essays were compiled in In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), Sent by Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Bombing of the World Trade Center and Pentagon (2001), We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (2006), and The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm’s Way (2013). Walker also wrote juvenile fiction and critical essays on such female writers as Flannery O’Connor and Zora Neale Hurston. In 2011, Walker published a memoir, The Chicken Chronicles, discussing her care for a flock of chickens. The documentary Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth was released in 2013.
Primary Text Source: Brittanica
Additional Text Source: Emory University
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Alice Walker Papers, Emory University →