Hard Times Require Furious Dancing

"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, the power we each share to express our truest, deepest selves. Beloved for her ability to speak her own truth in ways that speak for and about countless others, she demonstrates that we are stronger than our circumstances. As she confronts personal and collective challenges, her words dance, sing, and heal.

“Though we have encountered our share of grief and troubles on this earth, we can still hold the line of beauty, form, and beat. No small accomplishment in a world as challenging as this one.” — from the preface "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, the power we each share to express our truest, deepest selves. Beloved for her ability to speak her own truth in ways that speak for and about countless others, she demonstrates that we are stronger than our circumstances. As she confronts personal and collective challenges, her words dance, sing, and heal.

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 this exquisite book, Alice Walker’s first new collection of poetry since 1991, are poems that reaffirm her as “one of the best American writers of today” (The Washington Post). The forces of nature and the strength of the human spirit inspire the poems in Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth. Alice Walker opens us to feeling and understanding, with poems that cover a broad spectrum of emotions. With profound artistry, Walker searches for, discovers, and declares the fundamental beauty of existence, as she explores what it means to experience life fully, to learn from it, and to grow both as an individual and as part of a greater spiritual community. About Walker’s Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, America said, “In the tradition of Whitman, Walker sings, celebrates and agonizes over the ordinary vicissitudes that link and separate all of humankind,” and the same can be said about this astonishing new collection, Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth.

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.

Popular music grew out of ragtime, vaudeville and the blues to become global mass entertainment. Women like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith were the original pop divas, yet eighty years after they blazed a trail, have their successors achieved the recognition and affirmation they deserve? Or has the only was to success been to slot into saleable images of the cute baby or sexy chanteuse? Lucy O'Brien has written the ultimate hands-on history of women in rock, pop, and soul. Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Dusty Springfield, Patti Smith, Madonna, Joni Mitchell, whitney Houston, Courtney Love, Alanis Morissette, Destiny's child - all the key names are here. But She Bop II refuses to look at women artists simply as personalities, problems or victims. From dream babes to rock chicks, riot grrrls and ragamuffins, girlpower, Lilith Fair rock and the rise of the corporate diva, She Bop II is the uncompromising story of women as creators and innovators. Lucy O'Brien is the author of two previous books: the bestsellers Annie Lennox (1991) and Dusty (1989). She has contributed to the Guardian, Sunday Times, Observer, Marie Claire, New Musical Express and The Face, and worked extensively in TV and radio, as both guest pundit and producer.

In his new collection of poems, Dick Davis, the acclaimed author of Belonging, addresses themes that he has long worked with—travel, the experience of being a stranger, the clash of cultures, the vagaries of love, the pleasures and epiphanies of meaning that art allows us. But A Trick of Sunlight introduces a new theme that revolves around the idea of happiness—is it possible, must it be illusory, is its fleetingness an essential part of its nature so that disillusion is inevitable? Many of the poems are shaded by the poet’s awareness of growing older, and by the ways that this both shuts down many of life’s possibilities and frees us from their demands. The levity of some verses here is something of a departure for Davis, but his insights can be mordant too, revealing darknesses as often as they invoke frivolity. As Davis’s readers have come to expect, the poems in A Trick of Sunlight. aim at the aesthetic satisfactions that accompany accurate observations expressed with wit, intelligence, and grace. But they achieve as well an immediacy and rawness of vision that seem to belie his careful craft.

Alice Walker has always turned to poetry to express some of her most personal and deeply felt concerns. She has said that her poems-even the happy ones-emerge from an accumulation of sadness, when she stands again in the sunlight. This collection] has two fine strengths-a music that comes along sometimes, as sad and cheery as a lonely woman's whistling-and Miss Walker's own tragicomic gifts (New York Times Book Review).

A history of the Magnolia State's notorious watchdog agency established for maintaining racial segregation

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.