This is an accepted version of this page Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker (born February 9, 1944)[2] is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist.

Walker, born in rural Georgia, overcame challenges such as childhood injury and segregation to become a valedictorian and eventually graduated from Sarah Lawrence College.

As an activist, Walker participated in the Civil Rights Movement, advocated for women of color through the term "womanism," and has been involved in animal advocacy and pacifism.

[7] There, she went on to become valedictorian, and enrolled in Spelman College in 1961 after being granted a full scholarship by the state of Georgia for having the highest academic achievements of her class.

[5] She found two of her professors, Howard Zinn and Staughton Lynd, to be great mentors during her time at Spelman, but both were transferred two years later.

[8] Walker wrote the poems that would culminate in her first book of poetry, entitled Once, while she was a student in East Africa and during her senior year at Sarah Lawrence College.

In 1973, before becoming editor of Ms. magazine, Walker and literary scholar Charlotte D. Hunt discovered an unmarked grave they believed to be that of Zora Neale Hurston in Ft. Pierce, Florida.

Walker had it marked with a gray marker stating ZORA NEALE HURSTON / A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH / NOVELIST FOLKLORIST / ANTHROPOLOGIST / 1901–1960.

Meridian is a novel about activist workers in the South, during the civil rights movement, with events that closely parallel some of Walker's own experiences.

The book became a bestseller, and it was subsequently adapted into a critically acclaimed 1985 movie which was directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg, as well as a 2005 Broadway musical totaling 910 performances.

In 2000, Walker released a collection of short fiction, based on her own life, called The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart, exploring love and race relations.

In this book, Walker details her interracial relationship with Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a civil rights attorney who was also working in Mississippi.

In 2013, Alice Walker published two new books, one of them entitled The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm's Way.

[27][28] On March 8, 2003, International Women's Day, on the eve of the Iraq War, Walker was arrested with 26 others, including fellow authors Maxine Hong Kingston and Terry Tempest Williams, at a protest outside the White House, for crossing a police line during an anti-war rally.

Womanism as a movement came into fruition in 1985 at the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature to address Black women's concerns from their own intellectual, physical, and spiritual perspectives.

The philosophy of womanism also served as the fundamental basis for the #MeToo Movement in which women publicly expressed their experiences of sexual abuse and harassment.

[37][38] In May 2013, Walker posted an open letter to singer Alicia Keys, asking her to cancel a planned concert in Tel Aviv.

[39] Walker has refused to allow The Color Purple to be translated and published in Hebrew,[40][41] saying that she finds that "Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories" and noting that she had refused to allow Steven Spielberg's film adaptation of her novel to be shown in South Africa until the system of apartheid was dismantled.

[42] In June 2013, Walker and others appeared in a video expressing their support for Chelsea Manning, an American soldier who was imprisoned for releasing classified information.

[44][45][46] Founder of Wikileaks, Assange was considered a large threat to U.S. national security during the Obama administration, as he revealed classified intelligence information surrounding war crimes and human rights violations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay.

In light of these developments, Alice Walker published an Opinion Editorial taking aim at the US justice system and calling for the vindication of the charges brought against Assange.

"[52] She herself expressed the view that women were being "erased" in language, dictionaries and society, and that "confusion" with respect to gender had led to hasty sex reassignment surgeries, at least when minors were concerned.

Kay wrote that Walker's public praise for Icke's book was "stunningly offensive" and that by taking it seriously, she was disqualifying herself "from the mainstream marketplace of ideas".

She listed Icke's And the Truth Shall Set You Free, a book promoting an antisemitic conspiracy theory which draws on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and questions the Holocaust.

[69] Walker argued that any "attempt to smear David Icke, and by association, me, is really an effort to dampen the effect of our speaking out in support of the people of Palestine".

She tweeted "I fully condemn and denounce anti-Semitism, prejudice and bigotry in all their forms – and the hateful actions they embolden" and said she had been unaware of Walker's statements on the issue.

"[76] In 2022, Walker was disinvited from the Bay Area Book Festival due to what the organizers referred to as her "endorsement of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist David Icke".

In 1984, she and fellow writer Robert L. Allen co-founded Wild Tree Press, a feminist publishing company in Anderson Valley, California.

Wells" was first published in Ms. magazine, Walker included a disclaimer that "Luna and Freddie Pye are composite characters, and their names are made up.

Phalia (Portrait of Alice Walker) (1989) is a photograph by Maud Sulter from her Zabat series originally produced for the Rochdale Art Gallery in England.