Alice Walker

"A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to each other despite the unknown, the novel draws readers into...

"These are the stories that came to me to be told after the close of a magical marriage to an extraordinary man that ended in a less-than-magical divorce. I found myself unmoored, unmated, ungrounded in a way that challenged everything I'd ever thought about human relationships. Situated squarely in that terrifying paradise called freedom, precipitously out on so many emotional limbs, it was as if I had been born; and in fact I was being reborn...

A novel on two black sisters whose father forbids teen sex and when one engages in it gives her a hiding. The novel explores "the ways in which a woman's denied sexuality leads to the loss of the much-prized and necessary original self." By the author of The Color Purple. A family from the United States goes to the remote Sierras in Mexico-the writer-to-be, Susannah; her sister, Magdalena; her father and mother. And there, amid an endangered band...

"I was born to grow, / alongside my garden of plants, / poems / like / this one" So writes Alice Walker in this new book of poems, poems composed over the course of one year in response to joy and sorrow both personal and global: the death of loved ones, war, the deliciousness of love, environmental devastation, the sorrow of rejection, greed, poverty, and the sweetness of home. The poems embrace our connections while celebrating the joy of individuality,...

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...

Essays revisiting themes the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist, and activist has addressed throughout her career, exploring her conflicting impulses to retreat into inner contemplation and to remain deeply engaged with the world: racism, Africa, solidarity with the Palestinian people, the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, Cuba, health care, and the work of Aung San Suu Kyi.

A collection of early personal and political essays from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Color Purple.
Includes a new letter written by the author
  What is a womanist? Alice Walker sets out to define the concept in this anthology of early essays and other nonfiction pieces. As she outlines it, a womanist is a person who prefers to side with the oppressed: with women, with people of color, with the...

Fourteen short stories by the Pulitzer Prize winning author about strong women--their struggles and joys.

"In a story of compassion and grace, a black tenant farmer in Georgia follows a harrowing destiny. Despondent over the futility of life in the South, George Copeland leaves his wife and son in Georgia to head North. After meeting an equally humiliating experience 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, George Copeland faces a third--and...

A book of spiritual ruminations with a progressive political edge, from the Pulitzer Prize-winner who has devoted her life to befriending the earth. Walker has long been a force for sanity in a chaotic world. Here 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...