Alice Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, in 1944. She attended Spelman College and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1965. She moved to northern California in the late 1970s and in 1984 co-founded Wild Tree Press.
Her novels include The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Meridian (1976), The Color Purple (1982) and The Temple of My Familiar (1989). She was the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.