Her notable works include For My People (1942) which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, and the novel Jubilee (1966), set in the South during the American Civil War.

[1] She knew at a young age that she wanted to become a writer so that she could write books about people of colour that would not make her feel ashamed.

At the age of 15, she showed a few of her poems to Langston Hughes, on a speaking tour at the moment, who recognised her talent.

Her supervisor, Jacob Scher, was so impressed with her talent that he allowed her to work from home on her own material, a privilege accorded no other member of the Illinois staff.

[3] She was a member of the South Side Writers Group, which included authors such as Richard Wright, Arna Bontemps, Fenton Johnson, Theodore Ward, and Frank Marshall Davis.

[6] Walker became a literature professor at what is today Jackson State University, an historically black college, where she taught from 1949 to 1979.

[5] In 1942, Walker's poetry collection For My People won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition under the judgeship of editor Stephen Vincent Benét, making her the first black woman to receive a national writing prize.

[8][9] Her For My People was considered the "most important collection of poetry written by a participant in the Chicago Black Renaissance before Gwendolyn Brooks's A Street in Bronzeville.

"[11] Walker's second published book (and only novel), Jubilee (1966), is the story of a slave family during and after the Civil War, and is based on her great-grandmother's life.