Black HERstory: Dr. Margaret Walker Alexander Margaret Walker was born July 7, 1915 in Birmingham, Alabama. Walker joined the Federal Writers Project after graduating from Northwestern University. Dr. Alexanders contributions to American letters--four volumes of poetry, a novel, a biography, and numerous critical essays--mark her as one of this countrys most gifted Black intellectuals. These accomplishments, as well as fellowships and awards that she has earned, garner her much deserved praise, but they are even more remarkable given that she achieved most of them after 1943 when she was a college professor and a wife and mother of four children. She wrote novels and poems about the African-American experience from the time of slavery up to the Civil Rights Movement. When For My People by Margaret Walker won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1942, she became one of the youngest Black writers ever to have published a volume of poetry in this century, as well as the first Black woman in American literary history to be so honored in a prestigious national competition. Walkers first novel, Jubilee, is notable for being the first truly historical black American novel, reported Washington Post contributor Crispin Y. Campbell. It was also the first work by a black writer to speak out for the liberation of the black woman. The cornerstones of a literature that affirms the African folk roots of black American life, these two books have also been called visionary for looking toward a new cultural unity for black Americans that will be built on that foundation. Walker taught at Jackson State University until her retirement in 1979. She died on November 30, 1998.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 01:00:00 +0000
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