Anniina's Alice Walker Page




Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, the eighth and last child of Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker, who were sharecroppers. When Alice Walker was eight years old, she lost sight of one eye when one of her older brothers shot her with a BB gun by accident. In high school, Alice Walker was valedictorian of her class, and that achievement, coupled with a "rehabilitation scholarship" made it possible for her to go to Spelman, a college for black women in Atlanta, Georgia. After spending two years at Spelman, she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and during her junior year traveled to Africa as an exchange student. She received her bachelor of arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College in 1965.

After finishing college, Walker lived for a short time in New York, then from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s, she lived in Tougaloo, Mississippi, during which time she had a daughter, Rebecca, in 1969. Alice Walker was active in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's, and in the 1990's she is still 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. Alice Walker started her own publishing company, Wild Trees Press, in 1984. She currently resides in Northern California with her dog, Marley.

She received the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for The Color Purple. Among her numerous awards and honors are the Lillian Smith Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts & Letters, a nomination for the National Book Award, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, a Merrill Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Front Page Award for Best Magazine Criticism from the Newswoman's Club of New York. She also has received the Townsend Prize and a Lyndhurst Prize.


































  Biographical
Biography - Encyclopedia Britannica
Biography - Michael E. Muellero
Biography - Bedford/St. Martin's
Biography - at GeoCities
Living by Grace: The Life and Times of Alice Walker - Chris Danielle

Interviews
Alice Walker Interview (2003) - Monikka Stallworth
Alice Walker Interview (2002) - Esther Iverem
Alice Walker Interview (2001) - Duncan Campbell
Alice Walker Interview (1998) - Miles O'Brien
Alice Walker Interview (1996) - Ellen Kanner
Alice Walker Audio Interviews (1985, 1998) - BBC4
LitChat with Alice Walker - at Salon

Poetry, Short Stories, and Excerpts
Short Story: Everyday Use
Excerpts from The Color Purple
Excerpt from By the Light of My Father's Smile
Excerpt from The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart
Excerpt from Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart
Excerpt from Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth
Alice Walker Quotations
FRANK's Creative Quotations from Alice Walker
Excerpt from The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart: Finding Langston
An Excerpt from Possessing the Secret of Joy
Another Excerpt from Possessing the Secret of Joy
An Excerpt from The Color Purple
An Excerpt from The Temple of My Familiar
An excerpt from In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens
A South Without Myths - by Alice Walker
3 poems by Alice Walker
Essay: Reflections on Working Toward Peace

Essays, Articles, and Criticism
Philomela Speaks: Alice Walker's Revisioning of Rape Archetypes in The Color Purple - Martha J. Cutter
Race and Domesticity in The Color Purple - Linda Selzer
“Everyday Use”: Defining African-American Heritage - David White
In Spite of It All: A Reading of Alice Walker's "Everyday Use" - Sam Whitsitt
Fight vs. Flight: a re-evaluation of Dee in Alice Walker's "Everyday Use" - Susan Farrell
Heritage and deracination in Walker's "Everyday Use" - David Cowart
Personal Names and Heritage in Everyday Use - Helga Hoel
Quilts and Art in Everyday Use
The Black Woman's Selfhood in Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy - Lâle Demirtürk
Postcolonial Sensibilities in 'Possessing the Secret of Joy' - Angeletta KM Gourdine
Dancing out of form, dancing into self - Barbara Frey Waxman
Alice Walker, Meridian and the Civil Rights Movement - Roberta M. Hendrickson
The intertextuality of 'Black Elk Speaks' and Alice Walker's 'Meridian' - Anne M. Downey
Green lap, brown embrace, blue body: the ecospirituality of Alice Walker - Pamela A. Smith
Jean Toomer and Okot p'Bitek in Alice Walker's "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" - Matthew A. Fike
Alice Walker's "The Child Who Favored Daughter" as Neo-Slave Narrative - Neal A. Lester
Covering and Signifyin' in Alice Walker's "Nineteen Fifty-Five" - David J. Mickelsen
Alice Walker's "Nineteen Fifty-Five": fiction and fact - Information Access Company
Essay on Roselily - Ragnhild Nyhagen
The Evolution of the Title Character in The Third Life of Grange Copeland - Dave DuMont
"You Just Can't Keep a Good Woman Down": Alice Walker sings the blues - Maria V. Johnson
Alice Walker's Colonial Mind - Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure
Black female writers' perspective on religion - Wirba Ibrahim Mainimo
Alice Walker's Africa: Globalization and the province of fiction - Olakunle George
Review of Warrior Marks

Bibliographies
Selected Bibliography - Paul P. Reuben

Reviews
Review of By The Light Of My Father's Smile - Karen Schechner
Review of "Everyday Use" - Claudia C. Tate
The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult - David Templeton

Miscellaneous
NY Times Featured Author: Alice Walker
Voices From the Gaps: Women Writers of Colormust visit
FGM-L Archives discussion on Alice Walker and Genital Mutilation
A letter from Alice Walker to President Clinton
Video: IN BLACK AND WHITE

Other Alice Walker Sites
New found growth: a web-site on The Color Purple - Matt Kane
A page on The Color Purple - Catherine Lavender
A page on The Color Purple - at GeoCities


The Works of Alice Walker:



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Site copyright ©1996-2006 Anniina Jokinen. All Rights Reserved.
Created on February 25, 1996 by Anniina Jokinen. Last updated on December 27, 2006.




Web Book Award
April 4, 1998.


October 5, 2002.