About the Author

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Alice Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, in 1944, to sharecroppers Minnie and Willie Lee Walker. The youngest of 8 children, Alice Walker was exposed to a number of contradictory forces that shaped her early life. She suffered from economic deprivation and the hardships imposed by segregation, but was able to pursue her education at Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence College, and has been deeply involved in the civil rights movement, working to register voters in the state of Georgia, and supporting projects like Head Start and welfare rights. She taught at Wellesley and Yale and worked as an editor at Ms. for a time. Walker has been widely acclaimed for her novel, The ColorPurple, which was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1983, and was later made into a highly praised film.

Major works by Walker

In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973)
Langston Hughes: American Poet (1973)
The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1973)
Meridian (1976)
You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (1981)
The Color Purple (1982)
In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983)
Living By the Word: Selected Writings 1973-1987 (1988)
The Temple of My Familiar (1989)
Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems, 1965-1990 Complete (1991)
Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992)
Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Binding of Women (1996) The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult: A Meditation on Life, Spirit, Art and the Making of the Film, The Color Purple, Ten Years Later (1996)
By the Light of My Father's Smile (1998)

Walker and the Web

This page from Voices from the Gaps, a site sponsored by the University of Minnesota that focuses on the artistic contributions of women of color, includes details about Alice Walker's life and her work, in addition to useful internet links.

This is Alice Walker's entry at imdb.com.

Click on this link to read a portion of an interview with Alice Walker from Salon.com.