Tuesday, February 9, 2010

History - African American - Today is Alice Walker's Birthday

Today is Alice Walker's 66th Birthday

Alice Walker Biography - in full Alice Malsenior Walker (1944–)

Novelist, poet, feminist. Born Alice Malsenior Walker on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia. Alice Walker is one of the most admired African American writers working today. She studied at Spelman College, Atlanta, and Sarah Lawrence College, New York, and then worked as a social worker, teacher, and lecturer. She took a brief sabbatical from her writing in the 1960s to live in Mississippi and work in the civil rights movement, returning to New York to write for Ms. magazine.

An accomplished poet, Alice Walker is best known for her novels, most notably 1982's The Color Purple for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The book was later made into a successful film, which tells the story of two black sisters in the segregated world of the Deep South. Later novels include The Temple of My Familiar, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and By the Light of My Father's Smile. She has also written volumes of short stories and essays, including You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down and In Search of My Mother's Garden.

Recently, Alice Walker published a collection of essays entitled We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Light in a Time of Darkness (2006). She also wrote the well-received picture book, There Is a Flower at the Tip of My Nose Smelling Me (2006). Her most recent novel was 2004's Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart.

Alice Walker was married to activist Mel Leventhal from 1967 to 1976; the couple had one daughter, Rebecca Walker.

RELATED WORKS

Novels

1970 The Third Life of Grange Copeland

1977 Meridian

1982 The Color Purple

1989 The Temple of My Familiar

1992 Possessing the Secret of Joy

1996 Banned

1998 By the Light of My FatherO's Smile

2004 Now is the Time to Open Your Heart

Poetry

1960 The Location of Things

1968 Once: Poems

1973 Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems

1979 Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning

1984 Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful: Poems

1991 Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems

2003 Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth

2003 A Poem Traveled Down My Arm: Poems And Drawings

2005 Collected Poems

Stories

1973 In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women

1981 You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down

Non-fiction

1983 In Search of My Mother's Garden: Womanist Prose

1993 Warrior Marks

1996 The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult

1997 Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism

1997 Go Girl!: The Black Woman's Book of Travel And Adventure

1999 Pema Chodron and Alice Walker in Conversation

2001 Sent By Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Bombing of the World Trade Center And Pentagon

2006 We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness (Meditation)


Last month I watched a documentary on TV where Ms. Walker was being interviewed in her home.
I was spellbound as I listened to her philosophy of life.
If anyone knows the name of that interview please let me know so that I can pass it along to others. She is indeed one of the most interesting people that I know of and certainly a person who I admire.

Happy Birthday Ms. Alice Walker




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