'Falling in love with imagination'

 

“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

 

Born into a sharecropping family in rural Georgia on this date in 1944, Walker has authored 17 books of fiction, and a dozen each of poetry and nonfiction.  She is the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her multi-award winning novel The Color Purple.   

 

“I started writing as a child. But I didn't think of myself actually writing until I was in college (at prestigious Sarah Lawrence in New York),” she said.  Right out of college she dived right into the writing world, working for Ms. Magazine while also devoting copious amounts of time to the Civil Rights Movement.  Her first book of poems, Once, was published in 1968 and her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, came out in 1970.   

 

Influenced by the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Walker is credited with bringing renewed attention to Hurston's writings and helping revive the popularity and respect Hurston first received during the 1920s.   And ’s Walker’s continued to be a tireless advocate for social justice.

   

“I think that all people who feel that there is injustice in the world anywhere should learn as much of it as they can bear,” she said.  “That is our duty.”