Alice Walker is an internationally celebrated writer, poet and activist best known for the novel “The Color Purple,” for which she won the National Book Award for hardcover fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Walker has written many bestsellers; among them, “The Temple of My Familiar,” “By The Light of My Father’s Smile,” and “Possessing the Secret of Joy.” This novel led to the 1993 book and documentary film “Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women,” both collaborations with British-Indian filmmaker Pratibha Parmar.

Her other work includes “The Third Life of Grange Copeland,” “Meridian,” and “Now Is the Time To Open Your Heart.” She has written multiple short story collections, including: “In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women” and “You Can’t Keep A Good Woman Down.” She has also authored seven volumes of poems.

Her work has been translated into more than two dozen languages, and her books have sold more than fifteen million copies. Along with the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Walker was honored as one of the inaugural inductees into the California Hall of Fame in 2006. In 2007, her archives were opened to the public at Emory University in her birth state of Georgia. In 2010, she presented the keynote address at The 11th Annual Steve Biko Lecture at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Walker has been an activist all of her adult life. She is a staunch defender not only of human rights, but of the rights of all living beings. She is one of the world’s most prolific writers, yet continues to travel the world to literally stand on the side of the poor, and the economically, spiritually and politically oppressed. She also stands, however, on the side of the revolutionaries, teachers and leaders who seek change and transformation of the world.

Walker’s most recent work includes three new published books, one of them entitled “The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm's Way.” The others, both books of poems, are entitled “The World Will Follow Joy Turning Madness into Flowers” and "Taking The Arrow Out Of The Heart." She was awarded the Mahmoud Darwish Literary Prize for Fiction in 2016.

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