Alice Walker

Alice Malsenior Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an American author, poet, and activist. She has written both fiction and essays about race and gender.  She is best known for the novel The Color Purple (1982).  She won the National Book Award  and the Pulitzer Prize for the novel.

Early life

Walker is an African American who was born in Eatonton, Georgia. She is the youngest of eight children. Her parents were Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant. Her father, who was, in her words, "wonderful at math but a terrible farmer," earned only $300 a year from sharecropping and dairy farming.  Her mother added to the family income by working as a maid.  She worked 11 hours a day for USD $17 per week to help pay for Alice to attend college.

In 1952, Walker was accidentally hit in the right eye by a BB gun fired by one of her brothers. Because the family had no car, the Walkers could not take their daughter to a hospital for immediate help.  By the time they reached a doctor a week later, she had become permanently blind in that eye. When a layer of scar tissue formed over her wounded eye, Alice became self-conscious and painfully shy. She felt like an outcast and turned for comfort to reading and to writing poetry. When she was 14, the scar tissue was removed.  She later became valedictorian and was voted most-popular girl, as well as queen of her senior class.

After high school, Walker went to Spelman College in Atlanta.  She later moved to Sarah Lawrence College near New York City, graduating in 1965. Walker became interested in the U.S. civil rights movement.  This was partly due to the influence of activist Howard Zinn, who was one of her professors at Spelman College. Walker returned to the South where she became involved with voter registration drives, campaigns for welfare rights and children's programs in Mississippi.

Activism 

Alice Walker met Martin Luther King Jr. when she was a student at Spelman College.  Walker credits King for her decision to return to the American South as an activist for the Civil Rights Movement.  She marched with hundreds of thousands in August in the 1963 March on Washington.  As a young adult, she volunteered to register black voters in Georgia and Mississippi.

On March 8, 2003, International Women's Day, on the eve of the Iraq War, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Terry Tempest Williams were arrested  with 24 others for crossing a police line.  This was during an anti-war protest rally outside the White House.

In March 2009, Alice Walker traveled to Gaza in response to the Gaza War. She was with a group of 60 other female activists from the anti-war group Code Pink. Their purpose was to deliver aid, to meet with NGOs and residents, and to ask Israel and Egypt to open their borders into Gaza.

Personal life

In 1965, Walker met Melvyn Roseman Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer. They were married on March 17, 1967 in New York City. Later that year the couple moved to Jackson, Mississippi.  They became "the first legally married inter-racial couple in Mississippi". They were harassed and threatened by whites, including the Ku Klux Klan. The couple had a daughter Rebecca in 1969.  Walker and her husband divorced on friendly terms in 1976.

Walker and her daughter grew apart.  Rebecca felt herself to be more of "a political symbol... than a cherished daughter". She published a memoir called Black White and Jewish, about the complexities of her parents' relationship and her childhood. Rebecca recalls her teenage years when her mother would go to her far-off writing studio while “I was left with money to buy my own meals and lived on a diet of fast food.” Since the birth of Rebecca’s son Tenzin, her mother has not spoken to her. Rebecca has learned that she was cut out of her mother’s will in favor of a distant cousin.

In the mid-1990s, Walker was involved in a romance with singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman.

In 2011 shooting began on Beauty in Truth, a documentary film about Walker's life directed by Pratibha Parmar.

Walker is a feminist. She made the word womanist for African American feminism against female genital mutilation.

Selected awards and honors
 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1983) for The Color Purple
 National Book Award for Fiction (1983) for The Color Purple
 O. Henry Award for "Kindred Spirits" 1985.
 Honorary Degree from the California Institute of the Arts (1995)
 American Humanist Association named her as "Humanist of the Year" (1997)
 The Lillian Smith Award from the National Endowment for the Arts
 The Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts & Letters
 The Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, the Merrill Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship
 The Front Page Award for Best Magazine Criticism from the Newswoman's Club of New York
 Induction to the California Hall of Fame in The California Museum for History, Women, and the Arts  (2006)
 Domestic Human Rights Award from Global Exchange (2007)

Selected works

Novels and short story collections
 The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970)
 In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973)
 Meridian (1976)
 The Color Purple (1982)
 You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories (1982)
 To Hell With Dying (1988)
 The Temple of My Familiar (1989)
 Finding the Green Stone (1991)
 Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992)
 The Complete Stories (1994)
 By The Light of My Father's Smile (1998)
 The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000)
 Now Is The Time to Open Your Heart (2005)
 Everyday Use (1973). Short stories, essays, interviews

Poetry collections
 Once (1968)
 Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973)
 Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning (1979)
 Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1985)
 Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems (1991)
 Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003)
 A Poem Traveled Down My Arm: Poems And Drawings (2003)
 Collected Poems (2005)
 Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems
 "Rage"

Non-fiction books
 In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983)
 Living by the Word (1988)
 Warrior Marks (1993)
 The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (1996)
 Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism (1997)
 Go Girl!: The Black Woman's Book of Travel and Adventure (1997)
 Pema Chodron and Alice Walker in Conversation (1999)
 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)
 Overcoming Speechlessness (2010)

References 

Citations

 
 

1944 births
Living people
African American writers
American activists
American feminists
American novelists
American poets
Pulitzer Prize winners
Writers from Georgia (U.S. state)
O. Henry Award winners