Alice Walker (1988)

Alice Walker: poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, publisher, student of late historian Howard Zinn, winner of the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, friend and benefactor to striving artists and struggling people everywhere. For more than four decades, from her first short story, “To Hell With Dying,” published in 1967 by Langston Hughes, to her 1988 essay collection, Living By the Word, Alice Walker’s life and art have been an affirmation of the virtue of struggle in a world beset by love and trouble. Unflinching in her assessment of what she sees around her, unwilling to excuse tyranny exercised in the name of love, Walker never once turns away from the world in the face of its troubles. From Eatonton, Georgia, where she was born; from her work in voter registration in Georgia and Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement; out of the earth and soul of the South; her poems and stories rise as naturally and fearlessly as “revolutionary petunias.”