Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker

(Paperback)

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'These journals are a revelation, a road map and a gift to us all' TAYARI JONES, author of An American Marriage

'Walker writes beautifully about the push and pull of intimacy . . . You find yourself admiring her idealism, her gift as a writer and her abundant appetite for life' THE TELEGRAPH

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple, Gathering Blossoms Under Fire presents four decades' worth of personal journals to offer a passionate, intimate record of Alice Walker's intellectual, artistic and political development.

Walker writes in an unvarnished and singular voice about an astonishing array of events: marching in Mississippi with civil rights foot soldiers, marrying a Jewish lawyer and defying 1960s anti-interracial marriage laws, writing her first novel, experiencing the trials and triumphs of the women's movement, being both admired and maligned for her work and activism, burying her mother and estrangement from her daughter. Her journals reveal an inextricable intertwining of the personal and political, exploring her thoughts and feelings in real time as a woman, writer, African American, wife, daughter, mother, lover, sister, friend and citizen of the world.

Reviews

Alice Walker contains multitudes. She is a truth-telling, word-working, change-conjuring, culture-shifting, revolutionary artist and citizen of the world. These journals are a revelation, a road map and a gift to us all -- TAYARI JONES, author of AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE
Those who know Alice Walker's body of work know that she inspired a generation of Black women writers who continue to impact America's literary landscape. And didn't so many of us read Walker to understand how to survive this place, to fight to become whole, to pull self-love to our fleshy, dark selves And now, to read Walker's journals - decades of unfiltered musings showing us a complex person with sorrows, triumphs, flaws, and beauties - feels like witnessing a medicine moment, a griotte's testimony -- HONORE FANONNE JEFFERS, author of THE LOVE SONGS OF W.E.B. DUBOIS
Walker writes beautifully about the push and pull of intimacy . . . You find yourself admiring her idealism, her gift as a writer and her abundant appetite for life * DAILY TELEGRAPH *
[An] impressive compendium. Walker's fans are in for a treat * PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY *
An intimate glimpse into an important writer's life * KIRKUS *

Author Bio

ALICE WALKER, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, is a canonical figure in American letters. She is the author of The Color Purple, The Temple of My Familiar, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart and many other works of fiction, poetry and nonfiction. Her writings have been translated into more than two dozen languages, and more than fifteen million copies of her books have been sold worldwide.

VALERIE BOYD was the author of the critically acclaimed biography Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, winner of the Southern Book Award and the American Library Association's Notable Book Award. She was the founder and director of the MFA Program in Narrative Nonfiction and the Charlayne Hunter-Gault professor of journalism at the University of Georgia. She was editor-at-large at the University of Georgia Press and senior consulting editor for The Bitter Southerner.