An essay collection from the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Color Purple. From the prolific writer, poet, and activist Alice Walker, comes a compilation of writing and speeches on advocacy, struggle, and hope. Drawing equally on Walker's spiritual grounding and her progressive political convictions, each chapter concludes with a recommended meditation to teach us patience, compassion, and forgiveness. We Are the Ones...

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...

"I was born to grow, / alongside my garden of plants, / poems / like / this one" So writes Alice Walker in this new book of poems, poems composed over the course of one year in response to joy and sorrow both personal and global: the death of loved ones, war, the deliciousness of love, environmental devastation, the sorrow of rejection, greed, poverty, and the sweetness of home. The poems embrace our connections while celebrating the joy of individuality,...

Short fiction about the female experience from the New York Times–bestselling author of The Color Purple, “one of the best American writers of today” (The Washington Post).  Here are stories of women traveling with the weight of broken dreams, with kids in tow, with doubt and regret, with memories of lost loves, with lovers who have their own hard pasts and hard edges. Some from the South, some from the North, some rich and some poor, the characters...

From the New York Times–bestselling author of The Color Purple: A “moving, tender” novel of a Deep South tenant farmer’s quest for a new life (Publishers Weekly). Grange Copeland, a deeply conflicted and struggling tenant farmer in the Deep South of the 1930s, leaves his family and everything he’s ever known to find happiness and respect in the cold cities of the North. This misadventure, his “second life,” proves a dismal failure that...

An American woman struggles with the genital mutilation she endured as a child in Africa in a New York Times bestseller “as compelling as The Color Purple” (San Francisco Chronicle).

In Tashi’s tribe, the Olinka, young girls undergo female genital mutilation as an initiation into the community. Tashi manages to avoid this fate at first, but when pressed by tribal leaders, she submits....

Part two of two. Speaking from the heart on a wide range of topics-poetry and writing, Mexico and The South, family and relationship, Buddhism and spiritual teachers, power and greed, politics and social change, death and transformations, and much more-Walker addresses these challenging times and how to live in balance.

Something was lost, says Alice Walker, when we took to heart traditional religious stories in which God is separate from nature. And something precious is regained when we honor our intrinsic sense of awe and worship toward nature, and our deep desire for connection with both nature and our human community. Walker calls for more humane motivation in international as well as personal action.

Bold and gifted as a speaker, poet and writer, Alice Walker offers colorful words of wisdom to a world in need of them. She urges us to question the assumptions and forces that guide our personal decisions, and reminds us of the power and necessity of dreams, visions and storytelling to keep our perspective.

Tells the story of two African-American sisters: Nettie, a missionary in Africa, and Celie, a child-wife living in the south, in the medium of their letters to each other and in Celie's case, the desperate letters she begins, "Dear God."