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Alice Walker
born 1944
Born Eatonton, Georgia
Alice Walker is a model of the engaged intellectual: her fiction is infused with the sense of righteous purpose that drove her early involvement in the civil rights movement of the 1960s when she was a college student. In the 1980s, she helped popularize the term "womanist" as a way to recognize the diverging priorities of women of color from those of their white feminist counterparts.
As the daughter of sharecroppers from rural Georgia, Walker has maintained an interest in vernacular Southern Black culture, working to revive the work of Zora Neale Hurston and other African American women writers who focused on folk life. In addition to writing poetry and criticism, Walker has published several novels, including The Color Purple (1982), which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The book quickly rose to the top of the best-seller list, and its film adaptation was nominated for eleven Academy Awards.
Bernard Gotfryd (1924–2016)
Gelatin silver print, 1976 |