This date marks the 𝐛𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐡 of Alice Walker in 1944. She is an African American author, speaker, and poet.

Born Alice Malsenior Walker in Eatonton, Georgia, she was educated at Spelman and Sarah Lawrence colleges. Walker is responsible for a number of writings. Most of her material portrays the lives of poor, oppressed African American women in the early 1900s.

The Third Life of Grange Copeland 1970 is about the emotional growth of an African American man. Meridian 1976 follows the life of an African American woman during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. She married activist Melvyn Leventhal in 1967. The couple had one daughter, Rebecca Walker, before divorcing in 1976. She won the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for her best-known work, the novel The Color Purple 1982.

Possessing the Secret of Joy 1992, explores the tradition of female circumcision still practiced in some parts of Africa. By the Light of My Father’s Smile 1998, depicts a Christian missionary family, focusing on the relationship between the father and the three daughters and the relationship between Christianity and the spiritual traditions of the African community in which the family lives. Walker’s volumes of poetry include Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems 1973 and Goodnight, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning 1979.

Her nonfiction works include the essay collections In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose 1983, Living by the Word 1988, The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (essays) 1996 and Anything We Love Can Be Saved 1997. In 2004, Walker has published her first book in six years, “Now Is The Time To Open Your Heart.”

Two years later, in 2006, she published a collection of essays, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Light in a Time of Darkness, and the well-received picture book There Is a Flower at the Tip of My Nose Smelling Me.

Continuing her work as a political activist, Walker also wrote about her experiences with the group Wom