Gathering Blossoms Under Fire

ALICE WALKER, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, is a canonical figure in American letters. She is the author of The Color Purple, The Temple of My Familiar, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart and many other works of fiction, poetry and nonfiction. Her writings have been translated into more than two dozen languages, and more than fifteen million copies of her books have been sold worldwide.

VALERIE BOYD is 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 is founder and director of the MFA Program in Narrative Nonfiction and the Charlayne Hunter-Gault professor of journalism at the University of Georgia. She is editor-at-large at the University of Georgia Press and senior consulting editor for The Bitter Southerner.

A beautifully illustrated, definitive account of Alice Walker's life, told in the Pulitzer Prize winner's singular voice.

Alice Walker contains multitudes. She is a truth-telling, word-working, change-conjuring, culture-shifting, revolutionary artist and citizen of the world. These journals are a revelation, a road map and a gift to us all
Those who know Alice Walker's body of work know that she inspired a generation of Black women writers who continue to impact America's literary landscape. And didn't so many of us read Walker to understand how to survive this place, to fight to become whole, to pull self-love to our fleshy, dark selves? And now, to read Walker's journals - decades of unfiltered musings showing us a complex person with sorrows, triumphs, flaws, and beauties - feels like witnessing a medicine moment, a griotte's testimony
Walker writes beautifully about the push and pull of intimacy . . . You find yourself admiring her idealism, her gift as a writer and her abundant appetite for life
[An] impressive compendium. Walker's fans are in for a treat
An intimate glimpse into an important writer's life