HERSTORY/LESBIANS IN THE ARTS

Alice Walker - Womanist Writer

Alice Walker

We have a beautiful mother

her green lap immense

her brown embrace eternal

her blue body everything

we know.

- from the poem We Have a Beautiful Mother
(Photo by Jean Weisinger, ©1991. Used with permission.)

Alice Walker has been an ever-present source of comfort, spiritual teachings, and inspiration to me since I first read a collection of her short stories, In Love & In Trouble, during my sophomore year of college in 1982.

My personal barometer for truth is the sound and its reverberation of a little bell that chimes within my heart whenever a life truth is introduced to me. In my search for enlightenment on the mysteries of our existence and my own humanity, Alice Walker has been my companion: trilling that little bell into elaborate orchestrations of rejoycement, reintroducing me to forgotten-but-now-found remembrances.

Through her collective life work, my own life has evolved: she guided the development and self-expression of my spirituality; she inspired me as I struggled to become a vegetarian; she helped me define my sexuality and womanism.

I offer a simple introduction here to the life and works of my favorite and most influential writer.

Books by Alice Walker

Biography

I wrote a biography of Alice Walker based on information gleaned from her collected works and from reading a published biography, Alice Walker (Black Americans of Achievement Series), by Tony Gentry, Chelsea House Publishing.

Here's a list of books about Alice Walker.

The Alice Walker entry in the Britannica Online Guide to Black History.

Other Web Information on Alice Walker

For a terrific set of Alice Walker links and a beautiful page, see Anniina's Alice Walker Page. Anniina recently added synopses of Alice's books. Thanks!

Pilgrim New Media offers instant access to internet search engines and directories with Alice Walker cued as the query! Get the latest information from web pages, news sources, and discussion groups.

Voices from the Gaps: Alice Walker ... an exceptional exploration with beautiful pictures. See their online discussion area for digital dialogue about Alice and her works.

From the Writing and Resistance website: Alice Walker. Excellent!

Sistahspace on Alice Walker as mother, womanist, truth teller and griot.

Texas Monthly online features Alice in their sourthern writers series.

Alice Walker's Ecospirituality - a marvelous synthesis of her writing, activism and spirituality.

The Wound as World: Sexual Abuse and Healing in Alice Walker's Fiction - a master's thesis.

Alice Walker - American History - a well written article on her life and works.

I'll Make Me A World - 6-hour PBS special on African-American artists of the 20th Century; Alice talks about Zora Neale Hurston and is featured herself.

Another helpful resource for students and teachers is the Alice Walker section of Longman English Online Composition.

Alice defines womanist.

Alice speaks on activism in the Black Collegian.

An excerpt from Anything We Love Can Be Saved.

An interview with Alice in Shambhala Sun, January 1997, called A Wind Through the Heart: Loving Kindness in a Painful World.

Alice is featured on the cover of the Spring 1997 edition of On the Issues magazine with a wonderful piece about spirituality! Wow, my favorite author in my favorite mag!

A fresh perspective on the Search for Identity in the Works of Alice Walker.

A letter to President Clinton from Alice Walker.

An article about Alice by Astrid Roemer. A candid, insightful and sensuous story. I found this on the University of Texas' (UT) digital library catalog and converted it into HTML.

Using the UT library catalog's online search features, I put together a list of journal/magazine articles written by Alice.

Here's some additional reference citations.

UT's English Department created a nice Web Page for Alice Walker as a collaborative class project last year. Plus 2 other UT students, Martha and Carrie, created an Alice Walker Biography as a class assignment.

Leigh Baker-Foley of Dublin, Ireland created a beautiful photo collage of Alice that can be used as a start-up screen on Macintosh computers. Leigh's beautiful works also include an exploration of feminist thought and action, she.



CREDITS
This page created by Melinda L. Jackson
Graduate Student in Instructional Technology
University of Texas at Austin
 
 

APA Citation for this source:

Jackson, Melinda. "Alice Walker - Womanist Writer" [On-line] (1996-1999).
Available URL: http://wwwvms.utexas.edu/~melindaj/alice.html
 

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