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 Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in
Eatonton, Georgia, the eighth and last child of Willie Lee and Minnie
Lou Grant Walker, who were sharecroppers. When Alice Walker was eight
years old, she lost sight of one eye when one of her older brothers
shot her with a BB gun by accident. In high school, Alice Walker was
valedictorian of her class, and that achievement, coupled with a
"rehabilitation scholarship" made it possible for her to go to Spelman,
a college for black women in Atlanta, Georgia. After spending two years
at Spelman, she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and
during her junior year traveled to Africa as an exchange student. She
received her bachelor of arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College in
1965.
After finishing college, Walker
lived for a short time in New York, then from the mid 1960s to the mid
1970s, she lived in Tougaloo, Mississippi, during which time she had a
daughter, Rebecca, in 1969. Alice Walker was active in the Civil Rights
Movement of the 1960's, and in the 1990's she is still an involved
activist. She has spoken for the women's movement, the anti-apartheid
movement, for the anti-nuclear movement, and against female genital
mutilation. Alice Walker started her own publishing company, Wild Trees
Press, in 1984. She currently resides in Northern California with her
dog, Marley.
She received the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for The Color
Purple. Among her numerous awards and honors are the 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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