Alice Walker Author Biographies

Alice 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 and raised eight children, Alice being the youngest. Later on Alice changed her Middle name to Tallulah-Kate in honor of her mother and paternal grandmother.

In high school, Alice was voted “Most Popular Student”. She was also Prom Queen and graduated Class Valedictorian. She attended Spelman College and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College on scholarships graduating in 1965.

Alice and attorney Mel Levanthal entered into an interracial marriage in 1967 when it was still illegal in some states. They had a daughter Rebecca in 1970 and divorced in 1976.

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. It is also apparent in her children's books. Alice teaches peace and equality.

Alice Walker became well known for her Pulitzer Prize winning book, “The Color Purple”. Many of us could not wait for the subsequent movie directed by Steven Spielberg and starring, Danny Glover, Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg.

Books By Alice Walker:

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 Temple of My Familiar (1989)
Possessing the Secret of Joy: A Novel(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 Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose(१९८३)
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: 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)