Alice Walker

Alice Malsenior Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983 for The Color Purple — the first Black woman to win the award — and in doing so brought the interior lives of Black women to the center of American literature. The novel, told through letters written by a poor Black woman named Celie in rural Georgia, is a masterwork of voice, resilience, and redemption that has sold over 5 million copies and been adapted into a film and a Broadway musical.

Born in Eatonton, Georgia, in 1944, the eighth child of sharecroppers, Walker was blinded in one eye at age eight when her brother accidentally shot her with a BB gun. The injury made her introverted and observant — qualities that served her writing. She attended Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence College, graduating in 1965 and immediately involving herself in the civil rights movement in Mississippi.

Walker coined the term "womanist" as an alternative to "feminist" — a word that centered the experiences of Black women and women of color. Her body of work includes novels, poetry, essays, and activism that consistently center the most marginalized voices. She was instrumental in reviving the work of Zora Neale Hurston, whose grave she discovered unmarked in a Florida cemetery and whose genius she helped bring back into the literary canon.