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Alice Walker Biography

in full Alice Malsenior Walker

(1944–)

Related Works

Novels
1970 The Third Life of Grange Copeland
1977 Meridian

1982 The Color Purple
1989 The Temple of My Familiar
1992 Possessing the Secret of Joy
1996 Banned
1998 By the Light of My FatherO's Smile
2004 Now is the Time to Open Your Heart
Poetry
1960 The Location of Things
1968 Once: Poems
1973 Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems
1979 Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning
1984 Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful: Poems
1991 Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems
2003 Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth
2003 A Poem Traveled Down My Arm: Poems And Drawings
2005 Collected Poems
Stories
1973 In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women
1981 You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down
Non-fiction
1983 In Search of My Mother's Garden: Womanist Prose
1993 Warrior Marks
1996 The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult
1997 Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism
1997 Go Girl!: The Black Woman's Book of Travel And Adventure
1999 Pema Chodron and Alice Walker in Conversation
2001 Sent By Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Bombing of the World Trade Center And Pentagon
2006 We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness (Meditations)

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Related People

Novelist, poet, feminist. Born Alice Malsenior Walker on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia. Alice Walker is one of the most admired African American writers working today. She studied at Spelman College, Atlanta, and Sarah Lawrence College, New York, then worked as a social worker, teacher, and lecturer. She took a brief sabbatical from her writing in the 1960s to live in Mississippi and work in the civil rights movement, returning to New York to write for Ms. magazine.

An accomplished poet, Alice Walker is best known for her novels, most notably 1982's The Color Purple for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The book was later made into a successful film, which tells the story of two black sisters in the segregated world of the Deep South. Later novels include The Temple of My Familiar, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and By the Light of My Father's Smile. She has also written volumes of short stories and essays, including You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down and In Search of My Mother's Garden.

Recently, Alice Walker published a collection of essays entitled We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Light in a Time of Darkness (2006). She also wrote the well-received picture book, There Is a Flower at the Tip of My Nose Smelling Me (2006). Her most recent novel was 2004's Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart.

Alice Walker was married to activist Mel Leventhal from 1967 to 1976; the couple had one daughter, Rebecca Walker.