The Color Purple author, poet and activist Alice Walker is set to publish excerpts from her personal diary in 2017. The book, called Gathering Blossoms Under Fire, will be edited by Valerie Boyd. Boyd wrote a biography of Zora Neale Hurston, one of Walker’s literary idols.
“I can’t help feeling the imprint of ancestors on the happy occurrence that Valerie Boyd, who wrote the extraordinary Wrapped in Rainbows, a biography of Zora Neale Hurston, has emerged to stand beside me as I tackle the work of transcribing and publishing Gathering Blossoms Under Fire, my journals of over fifty years,” shares Walker. “We anticipate a satisfying and joyful collaboration, joined as we are by the well respected and much celebrated publisher, Dawn Davis, of 37 INK. Three women of color standing together to offer what we hope will be a work of imaginative stimulation, amusement, support, and general usefulness to a beloved community of readers in a severely troubled and perplexing world.”
The 69-year-old Walker has been keeping a diary for nearly half a century, filling more than 65 notebooks that document her life’s journey from a sharecropper’s shack in rural Georgia to becoming a cultural icon.
“Courage is the fundamental offering of these journals,” says Walker. “Patience with the critical inner and outer voice is next.”
In the mid-1990s, Walker was involved in a romance with singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman. Beauty in Truth, a documentary film about Walker’s life directed by Pratibha Parmar, premiered in March 2013.
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