While attending both Spelman and Sarah Lawrence Colleges, Alice Walker began to draw on both her personal tragedies and those of her community to write poetry, essays, short stories, and novels. This book analyzes literary works such as: "Meridian", "The Color Purple", "The Temple of My Familiar", "Possessing the Secret of Joy", and more.

A comprehensive reference including a biography, entries on all of Walker's works, and entries on related people, places, and topics.

Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, is perhaps the most important living American author. This work examines Morrison's life and writing, featuring critical analyses of her work and themes, as well as entries on related topics and relevant people, places, and influences.

Zora Neale Hurston, one the first great African-American novelists, was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance and an inspiration for future generations of writers. Widely studied in high school literature courses, her novels are admired for their depiction of Southern black culture and their strong female characters. Critical Companion to Zora Neale Hurston is a reliable and up-to-date resource for high school and college-level students, providing reliable information on Hurston's life and work. This new volume covers all her writings, including Their Eyes Were Watching God; her landmark works of folklore and anthropology, such as Mules and Men; and shorter works, such as her story The Gilded Six-Bits.

Presents the text of Alice Walker's story "Everyday Use"; contains background essays that provide insight into the story; and features a selection of critical response. Includes a chronology and an interview with the author.

Understanding Alice Walker serves both as an introduction to the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner's large body of work and as a critical analysis of her multifaceted canon. Thadious M. Davis begins with Walker's biography and her formative experiences in the South and then presents ways of accessing and reading Walker's complex, interconnected, and sociopolitically invested career in writing fiction, poetry, critical essays, and meditations. Although best known for her novel The Color Purple and her landmark essays In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, Walker began her career with Once: Poems, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. She has remained committed not merely to writing in multiple genres but also to conveying narratives of the hope and transformation possible within the human condition and as visualized through the lens of race and gender. Davis traces Walker's literary voice as it emerges from the civil rights and feminist movements to encourage an individual and collective search for justice and joy and then evolves into forceful advocacy for world peace, spiritual liberation, and environmental conservancy. Her writing, a rich amalgamation of the cutting-edge and popular, the new-age and difficult, continues to be paradigm shifting and among the most important produced in the last half of the twentieth century and among the most consistently prophetic in the first part of the twenty-first century.

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 The Color Purple (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: The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Meridian, The Color Purple, The Temple of My Familiar, Possessing the Secret of Joy, By the Light of My Father's Smile, The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart, Now is the Time to Open Your Heart.

Toni Morrison, the only living American Nobel laureate in literature, published her first novel in 1970. In the ensuing forty plus years, Morrison's work has become synonymous with the most significant literary art and intellectual engagements of our time. The publication of Home (May 2012), as well as her 2011 play Desdemona affirm the range and acuity of Morrison's imagination. Toni Morrison: Forty Years in The Clearing enables audiences/readers, critics, and students to review Morrison's cultural and literary impacts and to consider the import, and influence of her legacies in her multiple roles as writer, editor, publisher, reader, scholar, artist, and teacher over the last four decades. Some of the highlights of the collection include contributions from many of the major scholars of Morrison's canon: as well as art pieces, music, photographs and commentary from poets, Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez; novelist, A.J. Verdelle; playwright, Lydia Diamond; composer, Richard Danielpour; photographer, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; the first published interview with Morrison's friends from Howard University, Florence Ladd and Mary Wilburn; and commentary from President Barack Obama. What distinguishes this book from the many other publications that engage Morrison's work is that the collection is not exclusively a work of critical interpretation or reference. This is the first publication to contextualize and to consider the interdisciplinary, artistic, and intellectual impacts of Toni Morrison using the formal fluidity and dynamism that characterize her work. This book adopts Morrison's metaphor as articulated in her Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, Beloved. The narrative describes the clearing as "a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what. . . . In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees." Morrison's Clearing is a complicated and dynamic space. Like the intricacies of Morrison's intellectual and artistic voyages, the Clearing is both verdant and deadly, a sanctuary and a prison. Morrison's vision invites consideration of these complexities and confronts these most basic human conundrums with courage, resolve and grace. This collection attempts to reproduce the character and spirit of this metaphorical terrain.

Catapulted to fame in 1982 with the publication of her third novel—the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Color Purple—Alice Walker has become one of America’s most celebrated and divisive authors. With books such as Meridian and The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Walker’s writing has frequently been cited for messages in support of civil rights and feminism. Above all, however, Walker is a spiritual seeker. Her works are dominated by the search for truth, wholeness, and the spirit that connects everyone and everything. In Alice Walker’s Metaphysics: Literature of Spirit, Nagueyalti Warren examines the philosophy and worldview present in all of Walker’s writing. Warren contends that Walker is a literary theologian, citing the transformative changes that take place in the author’s fictional characters. Warren also points to Walker’s bravery in approaching taboo subjects, her generosity of spirit, and her love for humanity, which are represented throughout her poems, novels, short stories, children’s books, and essays. This analysis is further supplemented by primary sources from Walker’s unpublished material, including notes and scrapbooks. By exploring the spirituality evident throughout the author’s work, this volume shows how Walker challenges readers to recognize and understand their responsibility to the earth—and to one another. Providing a fresh, accessible look at one of the twentieth century’s most prolific women writers, Alice Walker’s Metaphysics: Literature of Spirit will appeal to both academics and fans of the author’s varied literature.

I Found God in Me is the first womanist biblical hermeneutics reader. In it readers have access, in one volume, to articles on womanist interpretative theories and theology as well as cutting-edge womanist readings of biblical texts by womanist biblical scholars. This book is an excellent resource for women of color, pastors, and seminarians interested in relevant readings of the biblical text, as well as scholars and teachers teaching courses in womanist biblical hermeneutics, feminist interpretation, African American hermeneutics, and biblical courses that value diversity and dialogue as crucial to excellent pedagogy.