Born to sharecropper parents in Eaton, Ga in 1944, Walker became a poet,
novelist, and short story writer, as well as the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize
and American Book Award for her novel
The Color Purple (1982). Walker was educated at Spelman and Sarah
Lawrence colleges, and took part in the civil rights movement in the 1960s,
later using these experiences in her depictions of the lives of southern black
men and women in her novels.
Sites about Alice Walker:
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Voices from the Gap: Women Writers of Color provides this comprehensive and
thoughtful page on Walker.
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Howard Zinn interviews Alice Walker, his former Spelman student, for Salon.com.
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This site, dedicated to Alice Walker, includes a detailed biography that
highlights experiences in Walker’s life that influenced her writing.
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The Homeless Poet's Cafe features this Alice Walker site.
Read the descriptions of Walker and her works on the Web sites listed on
Walker’s Biography
page and write about what it means to be a "womanist." Why do you think Walker
refers to herself as a "womanist" writer? How does "When the Other Dancer Is the
Self" reflect Walker's commitment to being a "womanist" writer?
Choose another journal or magazine article written by Walker from the links on http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/walker_alice.html and compare it to
"When the Other Dancer Is the Self," focusing on the ways in which Walker uses
personal events to comment upon larger issues. What issues are at stake in the
two pieces of writing you are comparing, and how does Walker manage to make
these experiences seem familiar to all her readers?
Choose an event in your own life, however small or insignificant it seemed when
it happened, and trace its effect on your future actions. You may want to divide
your essay into vignettes as Walker does in "When the Other Dancer Is the Self."
You may even want to imagine how your life might have been different had you not
had this particular experience.
Walker is said to have been strongly influenced by the writing of Zora Neale
Hurston. Read Hurston's essay, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," in
The Norton Reader (Regular, 10), and compare the ways
in which these two women describe defining events in their lives. How did these
events spark a different kind of self-awareness for each of them? What impact
did these events have upon their identities as they grew into adulthood? You can
learn more about Hurston from the following Web sites:
http://aalbc.com/authors/zoraneal.htm and
http://www-hsc.usc.edu/~gallaher/hurston/hurston.html.