Alice Walker
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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.
She won the 1986 O. Henry Award for her short story "Kindred Spirits" published in Esquire magazine in August of 1985.
A political activist, she is active in environmental, feminist, and civil rights causes. She has advocated ending the decades-long embargo against Cuba. Her daughter, Rebecca Walker, is also a prominent activist.
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Selected works
Novels and short story collections
- The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970)
- In Love & 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)
- Everyday Use (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 (2004)
Poetry collections
- Revolutionary Petunias & Other Poems (1973)
- Once (1976)
- 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)
Non-fiction
- In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983)
- Warrior Marks (1993)
- The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (1996)
- Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism (1997)
- Letter to President Clinton (http://www.cubasolidarity.net/awalker.html)
- 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)