Walker, Alice Malsenior (1944– )

US poet, novelist, critic, and essay writer. She has been active in the US civil-rights movement since the 1960s and, as a black woman, wrote about the double burden of racist and sexist oppression, about colonialism, and the quest for political and spiritual recovery. Her novel The Color Purple (1982; filmed 1985), told in the form of letters, won a Pulitzer Prize. Her other works include Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), which deals passionately with female circumcision; By the Light of My Father's Smile (1998); and The Way Forward is with a Broken Heart (2001).

She was born in Eatonton, Georgia. In 1972 she took a teaching post at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, where she founded the first women's studies course in the USA. Other novels include The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Meridian (1976), and The Temple of My Familiar (1989). Walker's collections of poems include Once (1968) and Revolutionary Petunias (1973), and her short stories and essays are collected in Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973) and In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983).