Essayist

Alice Walker

Alice Malsenior Walker, born in Eatonton, Georgia on February 9, 1944, the eighth and youngest child of Minnie Tallulah Grant and Willie Lee Walker, is an African American novelist, short-story writer, poet, essayist, and activist. Her most famous novel, The Color Purple, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1983. Walker’s creative vision is rooted in the economic hardship, racial terror, and folk wisdom of African American life and culture, particularly in the rural South.

Her writing explores multidimensional kinships among women and embraces the redemptive power of social and political revolution.

Walker began publishing her fiction and poetry during the latter years of the Black Arts movement in the 1960s. Her work, along with that of such writers as Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor, however, is commonly associated with the post-1970s surge in African American women’s literature.

Official Website – Alice Walker’s Garden

Quotes

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”