Alice Walker is an American novelist, poet, and activist, born in 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children in a family of sharecroppers. A childhood injury left her blind in one eye, an experience that turned her inward toward reading and writing. She attended Spelman College and later Sarah Lawrence College, and became active in the Civil Rights Movement, working on voter registration in Georgia and welfare rights in Mississippi.
Walker is best known for her 1982 novel The Color Purple, which tells the story of Celie, a poor Black woman in the rural American South, through a series of letters. The novel won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award, making Walker the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer for fiction, and it was adapted into an acclaimed film and a Broadway musical.
Beyond her fiction, Walker is an influential essayist and poet who coined the term womanist to describe Black feminism rooted in the experience and culture of women of color. Her work consistently explores race, gender, and the legacies of slavery and oppression, while celebrating resilience, spirituality, and the bonds among women.
A committed activist throughout her life, Walker has campaigned on issues ranging from civil rights to environmentalism and human rights around the world. Her body of work, spanning novels, poetry, short stories, and essays, has made her one of the most significant American literary voices of her generation.
