Alice Walker, born in Eatonton, Georgia in 1944, overcame a disadvantaged sharecropping background, blindness in one eye, and the tense times of the Civil Rights Movement to become one of the world's most respected African American writers. While attending both Spelman and Sarah Lawrence Colleges, Walker began to draw on both her personal tragedies and those of her community to write poetry, essays, short stories, and novels that would tell the virtually untold stories of oppressed African and African American women, providing readers with hope and inspiring activisim. Perhaps best known for her novel (1982), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 and became a controversial film three years later, Walker has introduced and developed womanist theory, criticism and practice, and continues to champion the causes of women of color by encouraging their strength and liberation in her life and her writings. Literary works analyzed in this volume: , .