Alice Walker

Alice Walker was born in 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia to a sharecropping family. A rather reserved child, Walker's childhood was marred by a shooting accident involving her brother in which she was blinded in one eye. As a result, Walker turned inward becoming more introverted and self-conscious of her appearance. As a means of coping, she turned to literature and writing. Biographies of Walker's have suggested that the family's financial situation prohibited her from receiving proper medical attention at the time.  

Committed to her studies, Walker was rewarded with a scholarship to Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, a prominent school for African American women. Entering Spelman, Walker was immediately struck by what she considered the highly rigid moral attitudes at the college. Disenchanted after two years, she left Spelman and enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. There, Walker encountered a more progressive, liberal atmosphere and began her efforts as a writer. She was encouraged by members of the faculty to share her writings. As a result, a professor introduced her to a literary agent and Walker's first collection of poetry was published in 1968. Walker completed her undergraduate degree at Sarah Lawrence and focused her attentions on working for the Civil Rights Movement. She relocated to Mississippi and began work as an instructor in the area. While there, she met and married Melvyn Leventhal, a civil rights attorney. Walker and Leventhal would become the first interracial married couple to live in Jackson, Mississippi. During their marriage, Walker gave birth to the couple's only child, Rebecca.  

Walker's writing has been highly influenced by the literature of Zora Neale Hurston, in particular, Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Walker has reported having read the novel close to a dozen times and having been spiritually and intellectually moved in different ways each time. It was Walker, so compelled by Hurston's literature, who took it upon herself to research and re-introduce Hurston's works to the public. Upon hearing that Hurston had died in poverty and buried in an unmarked grave, Walker began a personal journey to locate Hurston's grave and place a marker at the site resulting in the work, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens (1974).  

As a writer, Walker has been noted for using her works to address social concerns, illuminating the situations of the unfortunate and oppressed. Often, her works conjoin the explorations of sexism and racism as they operate in American society. In recent years, Walker has engaged in critical dialogue regarding traditional West African practices of female genital mutilation. Still, in the vast array of her works, she is perhaps most noted for the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Color Purple (1982), which was adapted into a major motion picture.  

Since 1968, Walker's has produced six volumes of poetry including Once (1968), Five Poems (1972), Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973), Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You In The Morning (1979), Horses Made a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1984), Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems 1965-1990 (1991). She has published two collections of short stories In Love and Trouble (1973) and You Can't Keep A Good Woman Down (1981). Her novels are The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Meridian (1976), The Color Purple (1982), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992). Her works for children and juveniles include Langston Hughes, American Poet (1974), To Hell With Dying (1988), and Finding the Green Stone [collaboration with Catherine Deeter] (1991). Walker's non-fiction works are In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), Living By The Word: Selected Writings 1973-1987 (1988), Warrior Marks [collaboration with Pratibha Parmar] (1994), The Same River Twice (1996), and Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism (1997). 

Program content by Violet Bryan,Ph.D. and Robin Vander