“I
have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the
imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and
it can do anything.” – Alice Walker
Author and activist Walker wrote the critically acclaimed novel The
Color Purple, for which she won the National Book Award a
Pulitzer Prize. Born in Georgia on this date in 1944, she says she was born to
write.
“My mother
says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig,” she
said. “I started writing as a
child. But I didn't think of myself actually writing until I was in college.
And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something - no, maybe junior - and
wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.”
Walker grew
up with “an oral story tradition" and chose to write them
down, collecting stories in her private journals for many years. A standout student all through school, she
won a full scholarship to Spelman College – a traditional Black institution in
Atlanta – and then transferred to Sarah Lawrence where she had that first book
of poetry published in her senior year. 
After spending time right out of
college working for the Civil Rights Movement, she began her professional
writing career on Ms. magazine where
she won acclaim as a journalist to accompany her creative writing. And she has continued a lifetime of
activism, supporting the oppressed and downtrodden around the globe.
"Artists
have a responsibility to speak and to act when governments fail,” she said, “and if we don't do that, we really deserve
the world we get.”
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