Alice Walker

"The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance, and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then from the sisters to each other, the novel draws readers into the experiences of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery, and Sofia"--

In Walker's follow-up to The Color Purple, webs of characters are drawn toward critical confrontations with history   In The Temple of My Familiar, Celie and Shug from The Color Purple subtly shadow the lives of dozens of characters, all dealing in some way with the legacy of the African experience in America. From recent African immigrants, to a woman who grew up in the mixed-race rainforest communities of South America, to Celie's own granddaughter...

"The Cushion in the Road" revisits themes the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist, and activist has addressed throughout her career: racism, Africa, solidarity with the Palestinian people, the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, Cuba, healthcare, and the work of Aung San Suu Kyi. In doing so, Walker explores her conflicting impulses to retreat into inner contemplation and to remain deeply engaged with the world.

"I was born to grow, / alongside my garden of plants, / poems / like / this one" So writes Alice Walker in this new book of poems, poems composed over the course of one year in response to joy and sorrow both personal and global: the death of loved ones, war, the deliciousness of love, environmental devastation, the sorrow of rejection, greed, poverty, and the sweetness of home. The poems embrace our connections while celebrating the joy of individuality,...

In one lifetime we have many chances to get it right Grange Copeland, a deeply conflicted and struggling tenant farmer in the Deep South of the 1930s, leaves his family and everything he's ever known to find happiness and respect in the cold cities of the North. This misadventure, his "second life," proves a dismal failure that sends him back where he came from to confront his now-grown-up son's disastrous relationships with his own family, including...

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave...

A poem that captures the wonderful interaction between nature and humans with such verses as "There is a sky at the end of my eye seeing me" and "There is a sunrise at the edge of my skin praising me."

An illustrated biography of the Harlem poet whose works gave voice to the joy and pain of the black experience in America.