Alice Walker

 

Alice Malsenior Walker is an author, poet, and activist. She has written both fiction and essays about race and gender. She is best known for the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple (1982) for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She was the fisrt African–American woman to be awarded the National Book Award. Alice Walker met Martin Luther King Jr. when she was a student at Spelman College in Atlanta in the early 1960s. Walker credits King for her decision to return to the American South as an activist for the Civil Rights Movement. She marched with hundreds of thousands in August in the 1963 March on Washington. As a young adult, she volunteered to register black voters in Georgia and Mississippi. Some of Walker’s works are The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Once, Warrior Marks, and The Color Purple.