Alice is a vegetarian, gardener, world traveler and spiritual
explorer. She lives in Mendocino, California.
"Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia,
the eighth and last child of Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker,
who were sharecroppers. When Alice Walker was eight years old, she lost sight of one eye
when one of her older brothers shot her with a BB gun by accident. In high school, Alice
Walker was valedictorian of her class, and that achievement, coupled with a
"rehabilitation scholarship" made it possible for her to go to
Spelman, a
college for black women in Atlanta, Georgia. After spending two years at Spelman, she
transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and during her junior year traveled to
Africa as an exchange student. She received her bachelor of arts degree from Sarah
Lawrence College in 1965." Read the rest of the bio at:
http://www.luminarium.org/contemporary/alicew/
(an excellent Alice walker webpage)
Why
War Is Never a Good Idea
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by Alice Walker (Author), Stefano Vitale (Illustrator)
Reading level: Ages 4-8
Hardcover: 32 pages
Publisher: HarperCollins (September 18, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0060753854
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If You like Alice
Walker |
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From Booklist
Though War is Old
It has not
Become wise
Walker writes in this spare, eloquent poem. Naive-style paintings in neon-bright colors celebrate forest diversity and urban communities across the globe. Then each community, in turn, is destroyed by war, its glowing warmth disappearing beneath clouds of smoke and ash. On the first page, a smiling frog and a beautiful pink flower bask in a pond; on the opposite page,
Huge tires
Of a
Camouflaged
Vehicle are
About to
Squash
Them flat.
Then the destruction intensifies: something drops from the sky on a
Latino boy dreaming on a haystack. Images of eyes greedy for oil give
way to a stark picture of mothers and babies buried beneath
swirling, tactile streams of waste. The communities are always idyllic,
with no hint of poverty or struggle, but the activist
message and sometimes frightening images will compel children to talk
about what they feel and see.
�Rochman, Hazel (November 1, 2006)
We Are the Ones We Have
Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness
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Amazon
Hardcover: 128 pages
Publisher: New Press (November 30,
2006)
Language: English
ISBN: 1595581375
Book Description: A beautifully packaged book of spiritual ruminations with a progressive political edge, from the incomparable Pulitzer Prize-winner�a woman who has devoted her life to befriending the earth.
From the Introduction: "In fact, the happiness that imbues this kind of (impersonal) friendship, whether for an individual or a country, or an act, is like an inner light, a compass we might steer by as we set out across the lengthening darkness. It comes from the simple belief that what one is feeling and doing is right. That it is right to protect rather than terrorize others; right to feed people rather than withhold food (and medicine); right to want the freedom and joyful existence of all human kind. Right to want this freedom and joy for all creatures that exist already, or that might come into existence. Existence, we are now learning, is not finished! It is a happiness that comes from honoring the peace or the possibility of peace that lives within one's own heart. A deep knowing that we are the earth�our separation from Earth perhaps our greatest illusion�and that we stand, with gratitude and love, by our planetary Self.
Author of the perennially bestselling novel The Color Purple, Alice Walker has long been a force for sanity in a chaotic world. In We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For she draws on her deep spiritual grounding, her political conviction and experience, and her literary gifts to offer a series of meditations filled with wisdom, hope, encouragement, and, at times, serenity to a world in need of all these things. The perfect gift for Alice Walker fans and anyone who longs for peace, on earth and within, this lovely volume will be embraced for its wise insights and mature compassion.
The
Color Purple
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ISBN: 0151191549
Format: Hardcover, 304pp
Pub. Date: May 1992
Publisher: Harcourt
"You better not never tell nobody but God."
Read a Review of Walker's The Color Purple written by Angeli Rasbury
Read an Article about the Color Purple on Broadway
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that tells the story of two sisters through their correspondence. With a new Preface by the author.
Published to unprecedented acclaim, The Color Purple established Alice Walker as a major voice in modern fiction. Beautifully imagined and deeply compassionate, this is the story of two sisters-one a missionary in Africa and the other a child wife living in the South-who sustain their loyalty to and trust in each other across time, distance, and silence. This classic work of American literature is rich with passion, pain, inspiration, and an indomitable love of life.
You Can't Keep a
Good Woman Down:
Stories (Harcourt Brace & Company)
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ISBN: 0156997789
Format: Paperback, 180pp
Pub. Date: March 1982
Click to
order via
Amazon
ISBN: 015602862X
Format: Paperback, 180pp
Pub. Date: May 2003
Thirteen stories that probe into relations between races and between sexes.
A natural evolution from the earlier, much-acclaimed collection In Love &
Trouble, these fourteen provocative and often humorous stories show women
oppressed but not defeated. These are hopeful stories about love, lust, fame,
and cultural thievery, the delight of new lovers, and the rediscovery of old
friends, affirmed even across self-imposed color lines.
There Is a Flower at the Tip of My Nose Smelling Me
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Amazon
by Alice Walker, Stefano Vitale (Illustrator)
ISBN: 0060570806
Format: Hardcover, 32pp
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Age Range: 4 to 8
From the Publisher
There is a road
At the bottom
Of my Foot
Walking me.
In a beautifully poetic and gently provocative text, Pulitzer Prize-winning
author Alice Walker invites readers young and old to see the world -- and our
place in it -- through new eyes.
Glowing colors and radiant images accompany this joyous celebration of the
connections and interconnections between self, Nature, and creativity.
Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart
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Amazon
ISBN: 0641714114
Format: Hardcover, 240pp
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Edition Description: Bargain
Edition Number: 1
From the Publisher
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple, Possessing the Secret of
Joy, and The Temple of My Familiar now gives us a beautiful new novel that is at
once a deeply moving personal story and a powerful spiritual journey.
In Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, Alice Walker has created a work that
ranks among her finest achievements: the story of a woman's spiritual adventure
that becomes a passage through time, a quest for self, and a collision with
love.
Kate has always been a wanderer. A well-published author, married many times,
she has lived a life rich with explorations of the natural world and the human
soul. Now, at fifty-seven, she leaves her lover, Yolo, to embark on a new
excursion, one that begins on the Colorado River, proceeds through the past, and
flows, inexorably, into the future. As Yolo begins his own parallel voyage, Kate
encounters celibates and lovers, shamans and snakes, memories of family disaster
and marital discord, and emerges at a place where nothing remains but love.
Told with the accessible style and deep feeling that are its author's hallmarks,
Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart is Alice Walker's most surprising
achievement.
Temple of My Familiar
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Amazon
ISBN: 0671683993
Format: Mass Market Paperback, 417pp
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group
Filled with the author's unique combination of magic and reality, this book is a
sweeping yet intimate novel about people who are tormented by the world's
contradictions--black vs. white, man vs. woman, sexual freedom vs. sexual
slavery, and past vs. present.
"The richness of Alice Walker's new novel is amazing, overwhelming. A
hundred themes and subjects spin through it, dozens of characters, a whirl of
time and places. Men are touched superficially: all the people are passionate
actors and sufferers, and everything they talk about is urgent, a matter truly
of life and death. They're like Dostoyevsky's characters, relentlessly raising
the great moral questions and pushing one another toward self-knowledge,
honesty, inducement."
�Ursula K. Le Guin, The San Francisco Review of Books
ISBN: 0375509046
The Pulitzer Prize�winning author of The Color Purple gives us her first new
collection of poetry in more than a decade, poems that reaffirm her as “one of
the best American writers of today” (The Washington Post).
ISBN: 0156028360
Despondent over the futility of life in the South, black tenant farmer Grange
Copeland leaves his wife and son in Georgia to head North. After meeting an
equally humiliating existence there, he returns to Georgia, years later, to find
his son, Brownfield, imprisoned for the murder of his wife. As the guardian of
the couple's youngest daughter, Grange Copeland is looking at his third — and
final “ chance to free himself from spiritual and social enslavement.
Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth: New Poems
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Format: Hardcover, 240pp
Pub. Date: March 2003
Publisher: Random House, Incorporated
Edition Description: 1ST
The forces of nature and the strength of the human spirit inspire the poems in
Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth. Alice Walker opens us up to feeling
and understanding with poems that cover a broad spectrum of emotions. With
profound artistry, Walker searches for, discovers, and declares the fundamental
beauty of existence, as she explores what it means to live life fully, to learn
from it, and to grow both as an individual and as part of a greater spiritual
community.
In “The Same as Gold,” Walker writes of the essence of grief, and of our
inherent powers of love and acceptance. In “Everyone Who Works for Me,” Walker
considers, with humor and grace, the frenzy that permeates modern life�a frenzy
that prevents us from seeing the beauty in everything we do until we step back
and take the time to look at and comprehend ourselves and those around us. In
�The Love of Bodies,” Walker elegantly expresses the gratitude and tenderness we
are capable of feeling for loved ones, living and dead, and the inescapable
emotional connections that bind us together.
About Walker's poetry, America has said, “In the tradition of Whitman, Walker
sings, celebrates and agonizes over the ordinary vicissitudes that link and
separate all of humankind,” and the same could be said about this astonishing
new collection.
Despite
the hunger
wecannot
possess
more
than
this:
Peace
in a garden
of
our own.
�from Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth
The Third
Life of Grange Copeland
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Format: Paperback, 328pp
Pub. Date: March 2003
Publisher: Harvest Books
Age Ain't Nothing but a Number: Black Women Explore
Midlife
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Carleen Brice Editor & Alice Walker Contributor
ISBN: 0807028231
Number Of Pages: 252
Publication Date: May 15, 2003
Publisher: Beacon Press
"Age Ain't Nothing but a Number is my roadmap."�Iyanla Vanzant
Forty-five black women writers�known and new�discuss midlife in the first anthology of its kind.
Finally, a collection that celebrates, considers, contemplates, even criticizes "midlife" from a black woman's point of view. Age Ain't Nothing but a Number ranges over every aspect of black women's lives: personal growth, family and friendship, love and sexuality, health, beauty, illness, spirituality, creativity, financial independence, work, and scores of other topics.
Midlife today isn't your grandmother's "change of life." Today, black women call hot flashes "power surges," and menopause, the "pause that refreshes." These days, middle-aged women may be newlyweds or new mothers, as well as grandmothers or widows. They may experience the empty-nest syndrome and then the "return-to-the-nest syndrome" as adult children move back home. They may navigate the field of Internet dating, travel the world, teach homeless women, take up pottery, or study international business.
This anthology captures all of these aspects of midlife as
experienced by some of the finest voices in African-American writing
today. Featuring
the work of Maya Angelou, J. California Cooper, Pearl Cleage, Nikki
Giovanni, Susan L. Taylor, Alice Walker, and dozens of others, Age Ain't
Nothing but a Number will make readers think, laugh, and cry and will be
the perfect gift
book for spring.