From the new book of poems:
THE WORLD WILL FOLLOW JOY: Turning Madness Into Flowers
Spring 2013
Bicycle dress guard by Simeli Ananda
What Do I Get For Getting Old?
A Picture Story
For The Curious
©2011 by Alice Walker
(You supply the pictures.)
I get to meditate
in a chair
Or against the wall
with my legs
stretched out
(or even in… Continue reading
“The first time I heard Howard Zinn speak I was a student in the deep South, and amazed that anyone could stay alive long enough to say such things. He was completely fearless, totally relaxed, making joking asides as he went straight to the bloody heart of Empire. How much time it has saved me, having him as a teacher my second year in college.… Continue reading
©2011 by Alice Walker (words); ©2011 by Tamara Staples (art).
I love this chicken because she is so in her body. If you look into her eyes you are right to know she is not thinking of your dinner.
One of the things I especially prize is that she is missing a toenail. At first I wanted the artist to put… Continue reading
In 2006 Alice Walker, working with Women for Women International, visited Rwanda and the eastern Congo to witness the aftermath of the genocide in Kigali. Invited by Code Pink, an antiwar group working to end the Iraq War, Walker traveled to Palestine/Israel three years later to view the devastation on the Gaza Strip. Here is her testimony.
Bearing witness to the depravity and cruelty, she presents the stories of the individuals who crossed her path and shared their tales of suffering and courage. Part of what has happened to human beings over the last century, she believes, is that we have been rendered speechless by unusually barbaric behavior that devalues human life. We have no words to describe what we witness. Self-imposed silence has slowed our response to the plight of those who most need us, often women and children, but also men of conscience who resist evil but are outnumbered by those around them who have fallen victim to a belief in weapons, male or ethnic dominance, and greed.
Acclaimed author, poet, feminist, activist, and, at the age of just thirty-nine, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Literature, Alice Walker is one of our most extraordinary living writers. From her discussions of black identity and feminism to ruminations on suffering and joy, Walker’s work has consistently displayed her extraordinary literary gifts, her fierce intelligence, and the deep political and spiritual convictions that… Continue reading
“[These] poems grow as naturally on the page as grass and flowers, yet never try to conceal a terrain of early graves, emotional land mines, and levies of sorrow.”
– Gloria Steinem, author of Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions
“Alice Walker’s new poems are a lifeboat in a storm, warm soup in the mouth, a rumba in the streets of the heart.”
– Jack Kornfield,… Continue reading