Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being abused and raped by her father and attempting to protect her sister from the same fate, and continuing over the course of her marriage to "Mister," a brutal man who terrorizes her. Celie eventually learns that her abusive husband has been keeping her sister's letters from her and the rage she feels, combined with an example of love...

In Alice Walker's fourth collection of poetry, simple observations from a life well lived balance an unflinching examination of critical global worries  The title of this collection comes from a Native American shaman who, reflecting on the terrible problems brought by white colonizers, nearly forgave them all because with the settlers came horses to the North American Plains. And, indeed, in these poems we find Alice Walker seeking a saving grace...

In the early eighties, the peaceful, reclusive life of poet and writer Alice Walker was interrupted by the appearance of three extraordinary gifts: a widely praised best-selling novel (The Color Purple), the Pulitzer Prize, and an offer from Steven Spielberg to make her novel into a film that would become a major international event. This last gift, which Walker identifies as "the knock at the door," led her into the labyrinth of a never-before-experienced...

Speaking from the heart on a wide range of topics - religion and the spirit, writing and language, families and identity, politics and social change - Walker begins with a moving autobiographical essay in which she describes her own spiritual growth and the roots of her activism, including reflections about religion in The Color Purple. She goes on to explore many important private and public issues: being a daughter and raising one, dreadlocks, banned...

In one lifetime we have many chances to get it right Grange Copeland, a deeply conflicted and struggling tenant farmer in the Deep South of the 1930s, leaves his family and everything he's ever known to find happiness and respect in the cold cities of the North. This misadventure, his "second life," proves a dismal failure that sends him back where he came from to confront his now-grown-up son's disastrous relationships with his own family, including...

"I was born to grow, / alongside my garden of plants, / poems / like / this one" So writes Alice Walker in this new book of poems, poems composed over the course of one year in response to joy and sorrow both personal and global: the death of loved ones, war, the deliciousness of love, environmental devastation, the sorrow of rejection, greed, poverty, and the sweetness of home. The poems embrace our connections while celebrating the joy of individuality,...

The story of an American family--would-be writer Susannah, her sister Magdalena, and her parents--who take up life with an endangered mixed race of Black Indians in the Mexican Sierras, explores how a woman's denied sexuality leads to a loss of self and the sexual healing of the soul.

The acclaimed author of The Color Purple presents a provocative story of a young tribal African woman who lives most of her adult life in America. Tashi submits toher people's custom of genital mutilation. Severely traumatize d by the experience, she spends the rest of her life battling madness, trying to regain the ability to recognize her own reality

A well-published, numerous-times-divorced woman leaves her lover to embark on a personal journey that begins on the Colorado River and traverses through her past and into her future, while her lover begins his own parallel voyage.