Alice Walker

1944-
Novelist, poet
Birthplace: Eatonon, GA
Graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, 1965

While attending Sarah Lawrence College in New York, Walker was an exchange student in Africa. Walker incorporates that experience and those of the American civil-rights movement into her writing. Her novels include Meridian (1976), The Color Purple (1982; Pulitzer), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), and By the Light of My Father's Smile (1994), and the short-story collection You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (1981). Many of her essays are collected in Living by the Word (1988) and Anything We Love Can Be Saved (1997). She has also written poetry: Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973) and Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems 1965-1990 (1991). Her awards are numerous: Lillian Smith Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts & Letters, a nomination for the National Book Award, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, a Merrill Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Front Page Award for Best Magazine Criticism from the Newswoman's Club of New York. She also has received the Townsend Prize and a Lyndhurst Prize.

Web Resources
Alice Walker Biography
More biographical information.
http://wwwvms.utexas.edu/~melindaj/bio.html

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