Alice Walker

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Alice Walker (Born 1944) is an American author and poet. Her works include Meridian (1976), The Color Purple (1982), and The Temple of My Familiar (1988).^[1]

Life and works[edit]

Walker was born February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, a town where blacks still participated in tenant farming.^[2] At age eight, her brother shot her in the eye with a BB gun, and her family had no car, so she did not see a doctor until a week later, and she became permanently blind in her right eye.^[3] She was embarrassed by this, and retreated into reading and writing, but her father, the first black man in the county to vote, insisted that she go to school, and she attended Spelman College.^[4] She also received a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, where she developed an interest in civil rights.^[5] She wrote the first of several volumes of poetry, Once (1968), about her experiences in the movement as well as her traumatic decision to abort a child.^[6] She wrote a few more volumes as well as a novel, Meridian, about the coming of age of some civil rights workers before moving to California and writing her most famous novel, the epistolary The Color Purple (1982).^[7] The novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction.

The next year, she published In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), a collection of essays in which she proposed the womanist movement.^[4] Her further novels include The Temple of My Familiar (1989), examining racial tensions, Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), a graphically violent work concerning women mutilated, By the Light of My Father's Smile (1998), of anthropologists who discover a Native American tribe while under the guise of missionaries, and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2005).^[7] Some have criticized her works to be overly feminist, and claim they portray almost all black men as villains and all white people as stupid or cruel.^[3]

Awards[edit]

Walker has received all of the following awards:^[8]

• Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellowship (1967)
• The Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts & Letters (1967)
• The Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (1973)
• The Merrill Fellowship (1973)
• Guggenheim Fellowship (1973)
• The Lillian Smith Award from the National Endowment for the Arts (1978)
• The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Color Purple (1983)
• National Book Award for Fiction for The Color Purple (1983)
• O. Henry Award for Kindred Spirits (1985)
• Humanist of the Year (1997)
• The Front Page Award for Best Magazine Criticism from the Newswoman's Club of New York (1999)
• Induction into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame (2001)
• Induction to the California Hall of Fame in the California Museum for History, Women and the Arts (2006)
• Domestic Human Rights Award from Global Exchange (2007)
• The LennonOno Grant for Peace Award. Walker presented the keynote address at The 11th Annual Steve Biko Lecture at the University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa, and was awarded the Lennon/Ono Grant for Peace, in Reykjavik, Iceland. Walker went on to donate the financial reward to an orphanage for the children of AIDS victims in Kenya.

See also[edit]

• Toni Morrison
• Maya Angelou
• Zora Neale Hurston

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• Extensive Biography by the Poetry Foundation
• Poems on the Poem Hunter website
• Extensive Biography at fembio.com
• Official Website, self-maintained