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Alice Malsenior Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an African American author whose most famous novel, The Color Purple, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award.
Walker's writings, including poems, stories, essays and novels, focus on the struggles of African-Americans, and particularly African-American women, against societies that are racist, sexist, and often violent. Her writings tend to emphasize the strength of black women and the importance of African-American heritage and culture.
Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the United States. She attended Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia and graduated in 1965 from Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers (Bronxville postal zone), New York. Her first book of poetry was written while she was still a senior at Sarah Lawrence. She returned to the South to work in the U.S. civil rights movement.
Walker was also an editor for Ms. Magazine. An article she published in 1975 was largely responsible for the renewal of interest in the work of Zora Neale Hurston.
A political activist, in 1996 Walker wrote to President Bill Clinton to protest the Cuban embargo. She is also active in environmental, feminist, and civil rights causes.
Her daughter, Rebecca Walker, is also a prominent feminist.
Selected works
- Once (poems)
- The Third Life of Grange Copeland
- In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women
- Revolutionary Petunias & Other Poems
- Meridian
- Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning
- You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories
- The Color Purple
- In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose
- Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful
- To Hell With Dying
- Living by the Word
- The Temple of My Familiar
- Finding the Green Stone
- Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems
- Possessing the Secret of Joy
- Warrior Marks
- The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult
- Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism
- By the Light of My Father's Smile
- The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart
- Letter to President Clinton (http://www.cubasolidarity.net/awalker.html)
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