Alice Walker

Alice Walker is a vegetarian, gardener, world traveler and spiritual explorer. She lives in Mendocino, California.

"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." 

 

 

large imageThe World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker by Alice Walker
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edited by Rudolph Byrd

Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: New Press, The (May 11, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 159558496X
ISBN-13: 978-1595584960
Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches

Read an AALBC.com Review

The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker includes compelling conversations between acclaimed writer Walker and other significant literary and cultural figures, including Gloria Steinem, Howard Zinn, Pema Chodron, Claudia Tate, Margo Jefferson, William Ferris, Paula Giddings, and Amy Goodman. Each conversation represents a different stage in Walker's artistic and spiritual development; taken together, they offer an unprecedented angle of vision on her career as well as on her personal and political development. Noted literary scholar Rudolph Byrd sets Walker's work into context with an introductory essay, as well as with a comprehensive annotated bibliography of her writings.

Includes Alice Walker in conversation with the following:

 

a poemA Poem Traveled Down My Arm: Poems and Drawings
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Hardcover: 176 pages
Publisher: Random House; 1 edition (October 28, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1400061636
ISBN-13: 978-1400061631
Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches

In this illuminating book, Pulitzer Prize'winning novelist and acclaimed poet Alice Walker reveals her remarkable philosophy of life. Curiously, this labor of love started with the author's signature: Faced with the daunting task of providing autographs for multiple copies of one of her poetry collections, Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth, Walker turned an act of repetition into an act of inspiration. For each autograph became something more than a name: a thoughtful reflection, an impromptu sketch, a heartfelt poem. The result is this spontaneous burst of the unexpected. A Poem Traveled Down My Arm is a lovely collection of insights and drawings'by turns charming and humorous, provocative and profound'that represent the wisdom of one of today's most beloved writers.

The essence of Walker's independent spirit emanates from words and images that are simple but deep in meaning. An empowering approach to life...the inspiration to live completely in the moment...the chance to nurture one's creativity and peace of mind'all these beautiful elements are evoked by this unusual and original book

 

Why War Is Never a Good Idea
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by Alice Walker (Author), Stefano Vitale (Illustrator)

Reading level: Ages 4-8
Hardcover: 32 pages
Publisher: HarperCollins (September 18, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0060753854

From Booklist

Though War is Old
It has not
Become wise

Walker writes in this spare, eloquent poem. Naive-style paintings in neon-bright colors celebrate forest diversity and urban communities across the globe. Then each community, in turn, is destroyed by war, its glowing warmth disappearing beneath clouds of smoke and ash. On the first page, a smiling frog and a beautiful pink flower bask in a pond; on the opposite page,

Huge tires
Of a
Camouflaged
Vehicle are
About to
Squash
Them flat.

Then the destruction intensifies: something drops from the sky on a Latino boy dreaming on a haystack. Images of eyes greedy for oil give way to a stark picture of mothers and babies buried beneath swirling, tactile streams of waste. The communities are always idyllic, with no hint of poverty or struggle, but the activist message and sometimes frightening images will compel children to talk about what they feel and see.
'Rochman, Hazel (November 1, 2006)

 

We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness
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Hardcover: 128 pages
Publisher: New Press (November 30, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN: 1595581375

Book Description: A beautifully packaged book of spiritual ruminations with a progressive political edge, from the incomparable Pulitzer Prize-winner'a woman who has devoted her life to befriending the earth.

From the Introduction: "In fact, the happiness that imbues this kind of (impersonal) friendship, whether for an individual or a country, or an act, is like an inner light, a compass we might steer by as we set out across the lengthening darkness. It comes from the simple belief that what one is feeling and doing is right. That it is right to protect rather than terrorize others; right to feed people rather than withhold food (and medicine); right to want the freedom and joyful existence of all human kind. Right to want this freedom and joy for all creatures that exist already, or that might come into existence. Existence, we are now learning, is not finished! It is a happiness that comes from honoring the peace or the possibility of peace that lives within one's own heart. A deep knowing that we are the earthour separation from Earth perhaps our greatest illusion and that we stand, with gratitude and love, by our planetary Self.

Author of the perennially bestselling novel The Color Purple, Alice Walker has long been a force for sanity in a chaotic world. In We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For she draws on her deep spiritual grounding, her political conviction and experience, and her literary gifts to offer a series of meditations filled with wisdom, hope, encouragement, and, at times, serenity to a world in need of all these things. The perfect gift for Alice Walker fans and anyone who longs for peace, on earth and within, this lovely volume will be embraced for its wise insights and mature compassion.

 

The Color Purple
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ISBN: 0151191549
Format: Hardcover, 304pp
Pub. Date: May 1992
Publisher: Harcourt

"You better not never tell nobody but God." 

Read a Review of Walker's The Color Purple written by Angeli Rasbury

Read an Article about the Color Purple on Broadway

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that tells the story of two sisters through their correspondence. With a new Preface by the author.

Published to unprecedented acclaim, The Color Purple established Alice Walker as a major voice in modern fiction. Beautifully imagined and deeply compassionate, this is the story of two sisters-one a missionary in Africa and the other a child wife living in the South-who sustain their loyalty to and trust in each other across time, distance, and silence. This classic work of American literature is rich with passion, pain, inspiration, and an indomitable love of life.

 

You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories (Harcourt Brace & Company)
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ISBN: 0156997789
Format: Paperback, 180pp
Pub. Date: March 1982

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ISBN: 015602862X
Format: Paperback, 180pp
Pub. Date: May 2003

Thirteen stories that probe into relations between races and between sexes.  A natural evolution from the earlier, much-acclaimed collection In Love & Trouble, these fourteen provocative and often humorous stories show women oppressed but not defeated. These are hopeful stories about love, lust, fame, and cultural thievery, the delight of new lovers, and the rediscovery of old friends, affirmed even across self-imposed color lines.
 

There Is a Flower at the Tip of My Nose Smelling Me
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by Alice Walker, Stefano Vitale (Illustrator)

ISBN: 0060570806
Format: Hardcover, 32pp
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Age Range: 4 to 8

From the Publisher

There is a road
At the bottom
Of my Foot
Walking me.

In a beautifully poetic and gently provocative text, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker invites readers young and old to see the world -- and our place in it -- through new eyes.

Glowing colors and radiant images accompany this joyous celebration of the connections and interconnections between self, Nature, and creativity.

 

Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart
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ISBN: 0641714114
Format: Hardcover, 240pp
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Edition Description: Bargain
Edition Number: 1

From the Publisher

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and The Temple of My Familiar now gives us a beautiful new novel that is at once a deeply moving personal story and a powerful spiritual journey.

In Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, Alice Walker has created a work that ranks among her finest achievements: the story of a woman's spiritual adventure that becomes a passage through time, a quest for self, and a collision with love.

Kate has always been a wanderer. A well-published author, married many times, she has lived a life rich with explorations of the natural world and the human soul. Now, at fifty-seven, she leaves her lover, Yolo, to embark on a new excursion, one that begins on the Colorado River, proceeds through the past, and flows, inexorably, into the future. As Yolo begins his own parallel voyage, Kate encounters celibates and lovers, shamans and snakes, memories of family disaster and marital discord, and emerges at a place where nothing remains but love.

Told with the accessible style and deep feeling that are its author's hallmarks, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart is Alice Walker's most surprising achievement.

 

Temple of My Familiar
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ISBN: 0671683993
Format: Mass Market Paperback, 417pp
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group

Filled with the author's unique combination of magic and reality, this book is a sweeping yet intimate novel about people who are tormented by the world's contradictions--black vs. white, man vs. woman, sexual freedom vs. sexual slavery, and past vs. present.

"The richness of Alice Walker's new novel is amazing, overwhelming. A hundred themes and subjects spin through it, dozens of characters, a whirl of time and places. Men are touched superficially: all the people are passionate actors and sufferers, and everything they talk about is urgent, a matter truly of life and death. They're like Dostoyevsky's characters, relentlessly raising the great moral questions and pushing one another toward self-knowledge, honesty, inducement."
'Ursula K. Le Guin, The San Francisco Review of Books

 

Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth: New Poems
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ISBN: 0375509046
Format: Hardcover, 240pp
Pub. Date: March 2003
Publisher: Random House, Incorporated
Edition Description: 1ST

The Pulitzer Prize'winning author of The Color Purple gives us her first new collection of poetry in more than a decade, poems that reaffirm her as 'one of the best American writers of today' (The Washington Post).

The forces of nature and the strength of the human spirit inspire the poems in Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth. Alice Walker opens us up to feeling and understanding with poems that cover a broad spectrum of emotions. With profound artistry, Walker searches for, discovers, and declares the fundamental beauty of existence, as she explores what it means to live life fully, to learn from it, and to grow both as an individual and as part of a greater spiritual community.

In 'The Same as Gold,' Walker writes of the essence of grief, and of our inherent powers of love and acceptance. In 'Everyone Who Works for Me,' Walker considers, with humor and grace, the frenzy that permeates modern life'a frenzy that prevents us from seeing the beauty in everything we do until we step back and take the time to look at and comprehend ourselves and those around us. In 'The Love of Bodies,' Walker elegantly expresses the gratitude and tenderness we are capable of feeling for loved ones, living and dead, and the inescapable emotional connections that bind us together.

About Walker's poetry, America has said, 'In the tradition of Whitman, Walker sings, celebrates and agonizes over the ordinary vicissitudes that link and separate all of humankind,' and the same could be said about this astonishing new collection.

Despite
the hunger
wecannot
possess
more
than
this:
Peace
in a garden
of
our own.
'from Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth

 

The Third Life of Grange Copeland
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ISBN: 0156028360
Format: Paperback, 328pp
Pub. Date: March 2003
Publisher: Harvest Books

Despondent over the futility of life in the South, black tenant farmer Grange Copeland leaves his wife and son in Georgia to head North. After meeting an equally humiliating existence there, he returns to Georgia, years later, to find his son, Brownfield, imprisoned for the murder of his wife. As the guardian of the couple's youngest daughter, Grange Copeland is looking at his third ' and final '  chance to free himself from spiritual and social enslavement.

 

Age Ain't Nothing but a Number: Black Women Explore Midlife
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Carleen Brice Editor & Contributor

ISBN: 0807028231
Number Of Pages: 252
Publication Date: May 15, 2003
Publisher: Beacon Press

"Age Ain't Nothing but a Number is my roadmap." --Iyanla Vanzant

Forty-five black women writers "known and new" discuss midlife in the first anthology of its kind.

Finally, a collection that celebrates, considers, contemplates, even criticizes "midlife" from a black woman's point of view. Age Ain't Nothing but a Number ranges over every aspect of black women's lives: personal growth, family and friendship, love and sexuality, health, beauty, illness, spirituality, creativity, financial independence, work, and scores of other topics.

Midlife today isn't your grandmother's "change of life." Today, black women call hot flashes "power surges," and menopause, the "pause that refreshes." These days, middle-aged women may be newlyweds or new mothers, as well as grandmothers or widows. They may experience the empty-nest syndrome and then the "return-to-the-nest syndrome" as adult children move back home. They may navigate the field of Internet dating, travel the world, teach homeless women, take up pottery, or study international business.

This anthology captures all of these aspects of midlife as experienced by some of the finest voices in African-American writing today. Featuring the work of Maya Angelou, J. California Cooper, Pearl Cleage, Nikki Giovanni, Susan L. Taylor, Alice Walker, and dozens of others, Age Ain't Nothing but a Number will make readers think, laugh, and cry and will be the perfect gift book for spring.

 

Related Links

Alice Walker's Garden - The Offical Website
http://www.alicewalkersgarden.com

Read the rest of the bio at:  (an excellent Alice walker webpage)
http://www.luminarium.org/contemporary/alicew/

 

 

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