In Search Of Our Mothers Gardens

Walker's essays and articles written between 1966 and 1982 discuss the concept and influence of art and the artist's life, criticisms of authors such as Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston, studies in the civil rights movement and feminist movement, and her own ideas while writing her book "The Color Purple."

Presents the text of Alice Walker's story "Everyday Use"; contains background essays that provide insight into the story; and features a selection of critical response. Includes a chronology and an interview with the author.

In Homegrown, cultural critics bell hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains reflect on the innate solidarity between Black and Latino culture. Riffing on everything from home and family to multiculturalism and the mass media, hooks and Mesa-Bains invite readers to re-examine and confront the polarizing mainstream discourse about Black-Latino relationships that is too often negative in its emphasis on political splits between people of color. A work of activism through dialogue, Homegrown is a declaration of solidarity that rings true even ten years after its first publication. This new edition includes a new afterword, in which Mesa-Bains reflects on the changes, conflicts, and criticisms of the last decade.

Understanding Alice Walker serves both as an introduction to the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner's large body of work and as a critical analysis of her multifaceted canon. Thadious M. Davis begins with Walker's biography and her formative experiences in the South and then presents ways of accessing and reading Walker's complex, interconnected, and sociopolitically invested career in writing fiction, poetry, critical essays, and meditations. Although best known for her novel The Color Purple and her landmark essays In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, Walker began her career with Once: Poems, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. She has remained committed not merely to writing in multiple genres but also to conveying narratives of the hope and transformation possible within the human condition and as visualized through the lens of race and gender. Davis traces Walker's literary voice as it emerges from the civil rights and feminist movements to encourage an individual and collective search for justice and joy and then evolves into forceful advocacy for world peace, spiritual liberation, and environmental conservancy. Her writing, a rich amalgamation of the cutting-edge and popular, the new-age and difficult, continues to be paradigm shifting and among the most important produced in the last half of the twentieth century and among the most consistently prophetic in the first part of the twenty-first century.

Drawing on papers, letters, journals, and extensive interviews with Walker, her family, friends, and colleagues, and with leading American cultural figures including Gloria Steinem, Quincy Jones, and Oprah Winfrey, White assesses one of the most influential writers of modern time.

A New York Times bestseller in hardcover, Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker’s We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For was called “stunningly insightful” and “a book that will inspire hope” by Publishers Weekly. Drawing equally on Walker’s spiritual grounding and her progressive political convictions, each chapter concludes with a recommended meditation to teach us patience, compassion, and forgiveness. We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For takes on some of the greatest challenges of our times and in it Walker encourages readers to take faith in the fact that, despite the daunting predicaments we find ourselves in, we are uniquely prepared to create positive change. The hardcover edition of We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For included a national tour that saw standing-room–only crowds and standing ovations. Walker’s clear vision and calm meditative voice—truly “a light in darkness”—has struck a deep chord among a large and devoted readership.

“A classic novel of both feminism and the Civil Rights movement” in 1960s Atlanta by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Color Purple (Ms.). As she approaches the end of her teen years, Meridian Hill has already married, divorced, and given birth to a son. She’s looking for a second chance, and at a small college outside Atlanta, Georgia, in the early 1960s, Meridian discovers the civil rights movement. So fully does the cause guide her life that she’s willing to sacrifice virtually anything to help transform the conditions of a people whose subjugation she shares. Meridian draws from Walker’s own experiences working alongside some of the heroes of the civil rights movement, and the novel stands as a shrewd and affecting document of the dissolution of the Jim Crow South. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Alice Walker including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

Our Mothers' War is a stunning and unprecedented portrait of women during World War II, a war that forever transformed the way women participate in American society. Never before has the vast range of women's experiences during this pivotal era been brought together in one book. Now, Our Mothers' War re-creates what American women from all walks of life were doing and thinking, on the home front and abroad. These heartwarming and sometimes heartbreaking accounts of the women we have known as mothers, aunts, and grandmothers reveal facets of their lives that have usually remained unmentioned and unappreciated. Our Mothers' War gives center stage to one of WWII's most essential fighting forces: the women of America, whose extraordinary bravery, strength, and humanity shine through on every page.

Mixing cultural criticism, literary history, biography, and memoir, an exploration of Alice Walker’s critically acclaimed and controversial novel, The Color Purple Alice Walker made history in 1983 when she became the ï¬?rst black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Color Purple. Published in the Reagan era amid a severe backlash to civil rights, the Jazz Age novel tells the story of racial and gender inequality through the life of a 14-year-old girl from Georgia who is haunted by domestic and sexual violence. Prominent academic and activist Salamishah Tillet combines cultural criticism, history, and memoir to explore Walker’s epistolary novel and shows how it has influenced and been informed by the zeitgeist. The Color Purple received both praise and criticism upon publication, and the conversation it sparked around race and gender still continues today. It has been adapted for an Oscar-nominated ï¬?lm and a hit Broadway musical. Through archival research and interviews with Walker, Oprah Winfrey, and Quincy Jones (among others), Tillet studies Walker’s life and how themes of violence emerged in her earlier work. Reading The Color Purple at age 15 was a groundbreaking experience for Tillet. It continues to resonate with her—as a sexual violence survivor, as a teacher of the novel, and as an accomplished academic. Provocative and personal, In Search of The Color Purple is a bold work from an important public intellectual, and captures Alice Walker’s seminal role in rethinking sexuality, intersectional feminism, and racial and gender politics.