Alice Walker - Introduction

Alice Walker is a poet, essayist, and novelist.  She was born on February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia.  She was the eighth and last child of sharecroppers Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker.  At the age of eight, she lost sight in one eye when one of her older brothers shot her with a BB gun by accident.  She was valedictorian of her class in high school.  She also received a “rehabilitation scholarship” which made it possible for her to attend Spelman.  Spelman is a college for black women in Atlanta, Georgia.  She attended Spelman for two years and then she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York.  She traveled to Africa as an exchange student during her junior year in college.  In 1965, she received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College.  After finishing college, she lived in New York for a short time.  She lived in Tougaloo, Mississippi from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.  She had her daughter, Rebecca, in 1969.  Alice was very active in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.  She continues to be an involved activist.  She has spoken for the women’s movement, the anti-apartheid movement, for the anti-nuclear movement, and against female genital mutilation.  In 1984, she started her own publishing company, Wild Trees Press.  She is a well-known fiction writer.  She has won numerous awards and honors.  Some of the awards and honors that she has received include the Lillian Smith Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts & Letters, and the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, a Merrill Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.  Her books have been translated into more than two dozen languages.  In 1983 she received the Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple.  She also had a nomination for the National Book Award and the Front Page Award for the Best magazine Criticism from the Newswoman’s Club of New York.  Alice had also received the Townsend Prize and a Lyndhurst Prize.  She currently lives in Mendocino, California with her dog, Marley.                                               

"Alice Walker." Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More. Web. 24 Apr. 2011.

Jokinen, Anniina. "Anniina's Alice Walker Page." Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature. 27 Dec. 2006. Web. 24 Apr. 2011.