Alice Walker - Author Biographies

By Elizabeth Lindsey

Alice Malsenior Walker was born on February 9, 1944 near Eatonton in White Chapel, Georgia. Her parents, Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant Walker, were impoverished sharecroppers. Alice was the youngest of eight children.

In high school, Alice was voted "Most Popular Student". She was also Prom Queen and graduated Class Valedictorian. She attended Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence College on scholarships, graduating in 1965. As a junior in college she spent a summer as an exchange student in Uganda, Africa.

After college, Alice helped in voter registration in Georgia, signing up black people to vote. She then took a job in the welfare department in the city of New York.

Alice and lawyer/activist Mel Levanthal entered into an interracial marriage in 1967 when it was still illegal in some states. They had a daughter Rebecca in 1970, but they divorced in 1976. Rebecca is also an activist and writer.

While in college Alice became an activist and a feminist (she calls herself a womanist) and still is active as reflected in her books and poetry. She is also a writer of short stories, a novelist, poet, anthologist and publisher. She is still a political activist and advocates civil rights for all people. She is also an activist for the environment, animal rights and women's rights. She is outspoken against female genital mutilation, thus her book, "Warrior Marks", "The Temple of My Familiar" and "Possessing the Secret of Joy."

Alice Walker became well known for her Nobel Prize winning book, "The Color Purple." Many of us could hardly wait for the subsequent movie directed by Steven Spielberg and starring, Danny Glover, Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg.

Alice Walker Books:

Fiction:
The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970)
In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973)
Meridian (1976)
You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories (1981)
The Color Purple (1982)
The Temple of My Familiar (1989)
Possessing the Secrets 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 Times to Open Your Heart (2005)

Nonfiction:
In Search of our Mother's Garden: Womanist Prose (1983)
Living by the Word (1989)
Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Binding of Women (1993)
The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (1996)
Anything We Love Can Be Saved (1997)
Sent by Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Burning of the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon (2001)
Langston Hughes, American Poet (2002)
We are the Ones We have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness (2006)

Poetry:
Once: Poems (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 (1988)
Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems 1965-1990 91991)
Absolute Trust in the Goddess of the Earth (2003)
A Poem Traveled Down My Arm (2003)

Children's Books:
To Hell with Dying (1988)
Finding the Green Stone (1991)
There is a Flower at the Tip of My Nose Smelling Me (2006)


As a bookworm, I am a voracious reader. I started doing author biographies on my favorite authors first. You can read more at more author biographies.

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