Charis welcomes Alice Walker in conversation with Pearl Cleage for a celebration of Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, 1965–2000. From National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker and edited by critic and writer Valerie Boyd, comes an unprecedented compilation of Walker’s fifty years of journals drawing an intimate portrait of her development over five decades as an artist, human rights, and women’s activist, and intellectual. This event is co-hosted by the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History. Copies of Gathering Blossoms Under Fire ordered from Charis will come with a signed bookplate from Alice Walker (while supplies last).

For the first time, the edited journals of Alice Walker are gathered together to reflect the complex, passionate, talented, and acclaimed Pulitzer Prize winner of The Color Purple. She intimately explores her thoughts and feelings as a woman, a writer, an African-American, a wife, a daughter, a mother, a lover, a sister, a friend, a citizen of the world.

In an unvarnished and singular voice, she explores an astonishing array of events: marching in Mississippi with other foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr.; her marriage to a Jewish lawyer, defying laws that barred interracial marriage in the 1960s South; an early miscarriage; writing her first novel; the trials and triumphs of the Women’s Movement; erotic encounters and enduring relationships; the ancestral visits that led her to write The Color Purple; winning the Pulitzer Prize; being admired and maligned, sometimes in equal measure, for her work and her activism; and burying her mother. A powerful blend of Walker’s personal life with political events, this revealing collection offers rare insight into a literary legend.

Alice Walker is a distinguished author and activist who has written dozens of books, including novels, poems, essays, short stories, and children’s books. She was the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel The Color Purple, which also won the National Book Award in 1983. Walker’s other books include The Third Life of Grange Copeland, The Temple of My Familiar, and Possessing the Secret of Joy. More than fifteen million copies of her books have been sold, and her work has been translated into more than two dozen languages. As an activist, Walker focuses on issues of inequality, poverty, and social injustice.

Pearl Cleage is an Atlanta based writer currently Distinguished Artist in Residence at the Alliance Theatre. Her plays include Flyin' West, Blues for an Alabama Sky, What I Learned in Paris and Angry, Raucous and Shamelessly Gorgeous. She is the author of 8 novels, including What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, which was an Oprah Book Club pick and a New York Times bestseller. She is co-author with her husband writer Zaron Burnett, Jr., of We Speak Your Names, a praise poem celebrating the lives of African American women. Her play Blues for an Alabama Sky is in production at LA's Mark Taper forum, directed by Phylicia Rashad,and will open in the fall at London's National Theatre. She is currently working on Something Moving: A Meditation on Maynard, a commission from Ford's Theatre Lincoln Legacy Project. She was recently named Atlanta's first Poet Laureate.

Valerie Boyd was the editor of Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, 1965–2000 and 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.

We offer this event in memory of Valerie Boyd's tremendous contributions to our Georgia literary community and in solidarity with all who mourn the loss of her brilliance and light.

This event is free and open to all people, especially to those who have no income or low income right now, but we encourage and appreciate a solidarity donation in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Charis Circle's mission is to foster sustainable feminist communities, work for social justice, and encourage the expression of diverse and marginalized voices. https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/CharisCircle?code=chariscirclepage

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