Motivational Speaker - Alice Walker - Total Access Speakers Bureau

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Achieving Diversity

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Alice Walker, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for The Color Purple, is internationally honored as an essential writer of our time. She is the author of six novels, including The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Meridian, The Temple of My Familiar, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and By the Light of My Father�s Smile; three collections of short stories: In Love & Trouble, You Can�t Keep a Good Woman Down, and The Way Forward is With a Broken Heart; three collections of essays: In Search of Our Mothers� Gardens, Living By the Word, and Anything We Love Can Be Saved; and five volumes of poetry: Once, Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, Good Night, Willie Lee, I�ll See You in the Morning, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, and Her Blue Body Everything We Know. She edited the Zora Neale Hurston reader, I Love Myself When I Am Laughing...And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive, and her books for children include To Hell With Dying, Langston Hughes, American Poet, and Finding the Green Stone. In the eighties she was publisher and co-founder with Robert Allen of Wild Trees Press. This was a highly successful adventure that permitted her to publish books only because she loved them. In the early nineties she served as executive producer of the independent film Warrior Marks, a documentary on the subject of female genital mutilation. She and the film�s director, Pratibha Parmar, also collaborated on a companion volume entitled Warrior Marks, Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women, published in 1993. Ms. Walker�s books have been critically appreciated and have also been best sellers. The Color Purple was on the New York Times Bestseller List for over a year. The Color Purple was also made into an internationally popular film by Steven Spielberg. To date, she has published twenty-three volumes. In all, her books have sold over ten million copies and have been translated into over two dozen languages. Ms. Walker�s memoir exploring the challenging and enriching interface of art and life, The Same River Twice, Honoring the Difficult, appeared in the winter of 1996.

Ms. Walker�s work has appeared in numerous journals and magazines including Ms., The New York Times Magazine, Harper�s, Mother Jones, and more. Her short stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories and twice in The O. Henry Prize Stories. Her essay �Looking for Zora� appeared in The Best American Essays of the Century, edited by Joyce Carol Oates.

Her many honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rosenthal Award for Fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Lillian Smith Award, and the Radcliffe Medal. Her book Revolutionary Petunias was nominated for a National Book Award. The Newswomen�s Club of New York awarded Alice Walker its annual Front Page Award for Best Magazine Criticism in 1976 for her essay �Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O�Connor.� She has also received the Townsend and Lyndhurst Prizes. She has been offered many more honorary degrees than she has had energy to accept.

Ms. Walker�s teaching experience includes guest lecturships and appointments at Wellesley College, the University of Massachusetts, Brown, Jackson State College, Tougaloo College andSarah Lawrence College. She was a Radcliffe Institute Fellow. She has been Fannie Hurst Professor at Brandeis University and Distinguished Writer in African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and Associate Professor of English at Yale. She was also for many years a contributing and fiction editor at Ms. Magazine.

Ms. Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia. She attended Spelman College in Atlanta and is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College. She is the mother of a daughter and lives in Northern California. An activist and social visionary, Ms. Walker has been a participant in most of the major movements for planetary change: among them, the Human and Civil Rights movement in the South, the Hands Off Cuba Movement, the Women�s Movement, The Native American and Indigenous Rights Movement, the Free South Africa Movement, the Environmental and Animal Rights Movement, and the Peace Movement. Her �advocacy on behalf of the dispossessed� has, in the words of her biographer, Evelyn C. White, �spanned the globe.�

One of her most recent books, ABSOLUTE TRUST IN THE GOODNESS OF THE EARTH, new poems, was published by Random House in March of 2003. A book of poems and drawings A POEM TRAVELED DOWN MY ARM was published in fall of 2003; two children�s books: WHY WAR IS NEVER A GOOD IDEA and THERE IS A FLOWER AT THE TIP OF MY NOSE SMELLING ME will be published in 2004. Her new novel NOW IS THE TIME TO OPEN YOUR HEART has just been released.