Anything We Love Can Be Saved; A Writer's Activism

New York: Random House, 1997. First Edition [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Anthony Barboza (Jacket photograph). xxv, [1], 225, [5] pages. Illustrations. Signed by the author on the half-title page [signature confirmed by comparison with multiple signatures found on the Internet]. Most of the essays in this book have been previously published but this is a unique collection. Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist. In 1982, she published the novel The Color Purple, for which she won the National Book Award for hardcover fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She also wrote the novels Meridian (1976) and The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970). An avowed feminist, Walker coined the term womanist to mean "A black feminist or feminist of color" in 1983. Walker wrote the poems that would culminate in her first book of poetry, entitled Once, while she was a student in East Africa and during her senior year at Sarah Lawrence College.[9] Walker would slip her poetry under the office door of her professor and mentor, Muriel Rukeyser, when she was a student at Sarah Lawrence. Rukeyser then showed the poems to her agent. Once was published four years later by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Walker met Martin Luther King Jr. when she was a student at Spelman College in the early 1960s. She credits King for her decision to return to the American South as an activist in the Civil Rights Movement. She took part in the 1963 March on Washington. Derived from a Publisher's Weekly article: Walker's commitment to activism--in its myriad cultural, political and spiritual forms--shines forth convincingly in this wide-ranging collection of personal essays, remarks, letters, speeches and statements, many previously published. Tracing her advocacy to an ancestor, May Poole--a former slave who outlived most of her owners and died at the age of 125--Walker channels her own "love of nature and... delight in human beings" into thoughtfully selected and well-defended causes. The most affecting pieces celebrate her spirituality, influenced by her early experiences with family and the local church; the challenge of raising her daughter, Rebecca, now a young adult; and the graduating seniors Walker lovingly addressed with 16 poems of encouragement at a recent Spelman College commencement. Her well-documented indignation over the controversial practice of female genital mutilation appears here, as well as her less-publicized but unmistakably passionate support of Fidel Castro. Walker's varied subjects include a visit to Carl Jung's Swiss retreat, the Million Man March, dreadlocks and the craft of writing. She honors various authors and artists, including Zora Neale Hurston, Salman Rushdie and the musical group Sweet Honey in the Rock. Constantly testing and stretching her readers' imaginations and boundaries, Walker expresses her warmth, her anger, her optimism in this provocative, lively collection.