ALICE WALKER

Date of Birth: February 9, 1944
Current Residence: San Francisco, CA
Education: Attended Spelman College; Sarah Lawrence College, B.A., 1965.
Profession: Lecturer and Writer-in-Residence at numerous colleges and universities including: Jackson State College, Wellesley College, University of Massachusetts-Boston, University of California-Berkeley, Brandeis University.

We live in a society as blacks, women and artists, whose contests we do not design and with whose insistence on ranking we are permanently at war. To know that second place, in such a society, has often required more work than first, a longer, grimmer struggle over greater odds than first—and to be able to fling your scarf dramatically while you demonstrate that you know—is to trust your own self-evaluation in the face of the Great White Western Commercial
-Alice Walker, from the dedication of I Love Myself When I am Laughing by Zora Neale Hurston, October, 1978

The most chilling thing to me about the response to The Color Purple was that the people said 'this doesn't happen'  what was really upsetting was the lack of empathy for the woman we ought to look at this because we don't want those women or children suffering.
-Alice Walker., Ebony, May 1992

[Alice Walker's] polemics on political and economic issues finally give way to what can only be described as a joyful celebration of human spirit—exulting, uplifting, and eminently universal.
-Andrea Ford, Detroit Free Press, August 8, 1982