Alice Walker

Alice Walker is an American novelist, poet and essayist, and a central figure of second-wave Black feminism and American letters. Her novel The Color Purple (1982) — the epistolary saga of Celie, a poor abused Black woman in the rural South — won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and was adapted into Steven Spielberg's film and a Tony-winning Broadway musical.

Walker grew up rural in Georgia as the eighth child of sharecroppers, marched for civil rights, and coined the term "womanist." Her essays (In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens), poetry and novels of spirituality and justice have made her one of the most influential and fearless writers of modern American literature.