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W

Walker, Alice M. (1944– )
Alice Malsenior Walker was born the eighth child
of sharecroppers Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant
Walker, on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Geor-
gia. Following the physically and emotionally
scarring experience of being blinded in her right
eye when her brother shot her with his BB gun,
Walker turned inward and began recording her
emotions. In 1961 she graduated at the top of her
high school class, and for the next two years she
attended Spelman College in Atlanta on a Georgia
Rehabilitation scholarship. In 1963 she transferred
to Sarah Lawrence College and, after receiving her
B.A., moved to New York City. In 1967 she mar-
ried Melvyn Roseman Leventhal, a civil rights at-
torney, whom she divorced in 1977; the couple had
moved to Mississippi, where Walker became active
in the CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT. Their only child,
Rebecca Grant, was born in 1969. Like her mother,
Rebecca is also a writer; she considers herself part
of the third wave of black feminism. In Mississippi,
Walker taught as writer-in-residence, first at Jack-
son State College and later at Tougaloo College.
At Wellesley College, Walker would also create
and teach the first course in the country devoted
to black women writers. She has also taught at the
University of Massachusetts–Boston, University of
California–Berkeley, and Brandeis University.
A prolific writer, Walker has published several
volumes of poetry, including Once (1968), Revo-

lutionary Petunias (1973), Good Night, Willie Lee,

I’ll See You in the Morning (1979), Horses Make a

Landscape Look More Beautiful (1986), and Her

Blue Body Everything We Know (1991). She is the

author of such well-known novels as The THIRD

LIFE OF GRANGE COPELAND (1970), Meridian (1976),

The COLOR PURPLE (1982), The Temple of My Famil-

iar (1989), Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), and

By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998). Walker’s

short stories are collected in In Love and Trouble:

Stories of Black Women (1973) and You Can’t Keep

a Good Woman Down (1981); her children’s books

include Langston Hughes, American Poet (1974),

The Life of Thomas Hodge (1974), To Hell with

Dying (1988), and Finding the Green Stone (1991).

Her nonfiction prose includes Living by the Word

(1988), The Same River Twice (1996), and The Way

Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000). In 1993 and

1994, Walker and Pratibha Parmar produced the

documentary film Warrior Marks and published

the accompanying book of the same title.

Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens

(1983) is a collection of “WOMANIST prose,” pref-

aced by her four-part womanist aesthetic, which is

meant to identify the nuances between white femi-

nism and what she identified as womanism based

on the popular black vernacular trope “womanish.”

Walker’s womanist aesthetics took shape in the late

1970s and early 1980s while she was searching for a

relevant vehicle with which to assess and evaluate