Alice Walker and the Black Arts Movement

Alice Walker (b. 1944)

Alice Walker is an African American novelist, short-story writer, poet, essayist, and activist. Her most famous novel, The Color Purple, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1983. Walker's creative vision is rooted in the economic hardship, racial terror, and folk wisdom of African American life and culture, particularly in the rural South. Her writing explores multidimensional kinships among women and embraces the redemptive power of social and political revolution.

 

Walker began publishing her fiction and poetry during the latter years of the Black Arts movement in the 1960s. Her work, along with that of such writers as Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor, however, is commonly associated with the post-1970s surge in African American women's literature.

Black Arts Movement 50th Anniversary planner, Marvin X, says, "Alice Walker is cordially invited to participate in the Bay Area BAM celebration. We would be honored to have her on board."