Author: Alice Walker

Alice Walker is an internationally celebrated writer, poet and activist whose books include seven novels, four collections of short stories, four children’s books and volumes of essays and poetry. She has won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, the National Book Award and the Mahmoud Darwish Literary Prize for Fiction and was honored as one of the inaugural inductees into the California Hall of Fame.

In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: The Creativity of Black Women in the South (May 1974)

From the May 1974 issue of Ms. magazine:

“What did it mean for a Black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers’ time? It is a question with an answer cruel enough to stop the blood. … How was the creativity of the Black woman kept alive, year after year and century after century, when for most of the years Black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a Black person to read or write? … The agony of the lives of women who might have been Poets, Novelists, Essayists and Short Story Writers, who died with their real gifts stifled within them.”