Alice Walker

Alice Walker is an American author, poet, and activist. She has written both fiction and essays about race and gender.

She is best known for writing the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. This made her the first woman of color to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The novel was also adapted into an Oscar-nominated film of the same name in 1985.

Walker met Martin Luther King Jr. when she was a student at Spelman College in the early 1960s. She credits King for her decision to return to the American South as an activist in the Civil Rights Movement. She took part in the 1963 March on Washington.

On March 8, 2003 — International Women’s Day — on the eve of the Iraq War, Walker was arrested, along with twenty-six others, including fellow authors Maxine Hong Kingston and Terry Tempest Williams.  She was at a protest outside of the White House, and was arrested for crossing a police line during an anti-war rally. Walker wrote about the experience in her essay, “We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For”.

In 1965, Walker met Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer. They married on March 17, 1967, in New York City. Later that year, the couple relocated to Jackson, Mississippi, becoming the first legally married interracial couple in Mississippi. They had a daughter, Rebecca, and divorced in 1976.

In the mid-1990s, Walker was involved in a romance with singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman, saying:

It was delicious and lovely and wonderful and I totally enjoyed it, and I was completely in love with her, but it was not anybody’s business but ours.