Alice Walker

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.

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