Alice Walker

Standard Name: Walker, Alice
Birth Name: Alice Malsenior Walker
Married Name: Alice Leventhal
Self-constructed Name: Tallulah-Kate
AW is an African-American writer and activist, who began publishing in the late 1960s and is best known for her novel The Color Purple. As well as other novels, she publishes or has published poems, short stories, essays, and journalism, and has produced a biography for children. All are linked by her passionate activism on a range of related social and political topics. Over the course of her career she has drawn fire both from white commentators for alleged bias in favour of her black characters, and from black commentators for allegedly bringing blacks into disrepute by unflattering depictions of them.
Photograph of Alice Walker, standing behind a podium and speaking into a microphone. She is wearing a blue jacket, dangling leaf-shaped earrings, and wire-rimmed glasses.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Anthologization Maud Sulter
MS had a conversation with Alice Walker , which was published as Wild Women Don't Get the Blues in Charting the Journey: Writings by Black and Third World Women.
Sulter, Maud. “Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues”. Charting the Journey, edited by Shabnam Grewal et al., Sheba Feminist Publishers, pp. 100-10.
100-10
Textual Features Maud Sulter
The exhibition was a large one. The first section, entitled Media Plays, (1984-88), critiques the ways in which Black people are represented in Western media and features enlarged newspaper photographs of Black athlete Ben Johnson
Publishing Maud Sulter
MS had approached Virago Press , a feminist publisher, but was told that they could not give her a decision about including her in their poetry series. They were awaiting the results of negotiations with...
Textual Production Kamila Shamsie
Other contributors included Deborah Moggach , Gillian Slovo , and Alice Walker .
Textual Production Michèle Roberts
The common thread among Women's Press publications was that most of the politicized novels demonstrate[d] an alliance with the women's movement, and blurred boundaries between theoretical and creative writing genres. The press's other authors included...
Reception Adrienne Rich
She accepted the award, together with fellow nominees Audre Lorde and Alice Walker , on behalf of all silenced women, and in their names gave away her prize.
Textual Production Winsome Pinnock
This was the first play that WP wrote, aged twenty-three. Though it is largely a play about women, it grew from interviews she did with veterans from the Falklands War, when she felt that the...
Travel Tillie Olsen
Apart from indefatigable travel around the USA (including Hawaii), TO visited London, Paris, and the USSR with her husband in 1980. In London she met the staff at Virago , her publisher...
Literary responses Tillie Olsen
Ann or Annie Hershey 's film, Tillie Olsen—A Heart in Action, gathers a number of tributes to her and to the lasting effects of her work from her feminist peers, figures like Gloria Steinem
Friends, Associates Tillie Olsen
Olsen's friendship with another writer, Alice Walker , survived various fallings-out. It finally ended when Olsen visited China in June 1983 with a party including Walker and Paule Marshall ; the issue was Olsen's monopolizing...
Literary responses Toni Morrison
Sarah Blackburn , who now suspected The Bluest Eye of having been over-praised, nevertheless celebrated TM as someone who really knows how to clank a sentence, and whose dialogue is so compressed and life-like that...
Literary responses Toni Morrison
Meanwhile, Jerry H. Bryant in the Nation perceived in Sula (along with Ed Bullins 's The Reluctant Rapist and Walker 's In Love & Trouble) something entirely unprecedented in black writing—a fierceness bordering...
Intertextuality and Influence Meiling Jin
In the introduction to the book of poems that was her first publication, MJ noted that poetry was a form of expression that comes easier to me than most others. This state of affairs was...
Reception Zora Neale Hurston
Writer Alice Walker placed a tombstone over the approximate location of ZNH 's grave in Florida. Taken from a poem by Jean Toomer , the epitaph reads A Genius of the South.
Walker, Alice. In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
94, 107
Commire, Anne, and Deborah Klezmer, editors. Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Yorkin Publications.
7: 598
Textual Production Zora Neale Hurston
Alice Walker selected and edited I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.

Timeline

1934: US feminist and writer Agnes Smedley, a supporter...

National or international item

1934

US feminist and writer Agnes Smedley , a supporter of Communist forces in China, published China's Red Army Marches, an account of the organization and growth of the Red Army 's campaign against the Kuomintang.

12 February 1980: US poet Muriel Rukeyser died in Greenwich...

Writing climate item

12 February 1980

US poet Muriel Rukeyser died in Greenwich Village, New York, two years after publishing her Collected Poems and four years after her last new collection, The Gates, 1976.

Texts

Walker, Alice. “’Outlaw, Renegade, Rebel, Pagan’: Interview with Amy Goodman from <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘j’>Democracy Now!</span> (2006)”. The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker, edited by Rudolph P. Byrd, The New Press, 2010, pp. 268-79.
Walker, Alice. “11th Annual Steve Biko Lecture”. Facebook.
Walker, Alice. “A Conversation with David Swick from <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘j’>Shambhala Sun</span> (2006)”. The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker, edited by Rudolph P. Byrd, The New Press, 2010, pp. 301-10.
Walker, Alice. Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth. Random House, 2003.
Walker, Alice, and Margo Jefferson. “Alice Walker and Margo Jefferson: A Conversation from LIVE from the NYPL (2005)”. The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker, edited by Rudolph P. Byrd, The New Press, 2010, pp. 237-67.
Walker, Alice. Alice Walker. The Official Website. http://alicewalkersgarden.com/.
Walker, Alice. “Alice Walker: Why I’m sailing to Gaza”. Sabbah Report.
Walker, Alice. Anything We Love Can Be Saved. Random House, 1997.
Walker, Alice. By the Light of My Father’s Smile. Random House, 1998.
Walker, Alice. Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning: Poems. Dial Press, 1979.
Walker, Alice. Hard Times Require Furious Dancing. New World Library, 2010.
Walker, Alice. Her Blue Body Everything We Know. Women’s Press, 1991.
Walker, Alice. Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful: Poems. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.
Hurston, Zora Neale. I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader. Editor Walker, Alice, The Feminist Press, 1979.
Walker, Alice. In Love and Trouble. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973.
Walker, Alice. In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.
Walker, Alice. Langston Hughes, American Poet. Crowell, 1974.
Walker, Alice. Living by the Word: Selected Writings, 1973-1987. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1988.
Walker, Alice. Meridian. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976.
Walker, Alice. Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart. Random House, 2004.
Walker, Alice. Once: Poems. Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968.
Walker, Alice. Overcoming Speechlessness: a Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo, and Palestine/Israel. Seven Stories Press, 2010.
Walker, Alice. Possessing the Secret of Joy. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1992.
Walker, Alice. Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.
Walker, Alice. Sent By Earth. Seven Stories, 2001.