Alice Walker

Alice Walker was the youngest of eight children born to Lee and Tallulah Walker, sharecroppers who were fiercely committed to her education. She graduated high school as the class valedictorian and enrolled at Spelman College, where she met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and began her lifelong work for Civil Rights and women’s rights. She  transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, where she earned her BA degree in 1965. Soon after, she took a job on the Legal and Education Defense Fund at the NAACP and began to publish poetry. She published her first collection of short fiction, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, in 1973. During her prolific career as a writer and activist, Walker has won many top prizes awarded to authors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for her 1982 novel The Color Purple, which sold more than 15 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than two dozen languages. The Color Purple was successfully adapted to film in 1985. It was directed by Steven Spielberg and starred Oprah Winfrey, who is an executive producer on a remake of the film released at the end of 2023. Walker has gone on to write more than 50 books. She has remained a fierce advocate for Civil Rights and women’s rights, and her work regularly appears on lists of essential reading for the Black Lives Matter movement. She currently lives in California.