Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker

Written by Alice Walker

Narrated by Aunjanue Ellis, Walker and Janina Edwards

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.

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 feeling 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 Pulizter 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 “revelation, a road map, and a gift to us all” (Tayari Jones, New York Times bestselling author of An American Marriage) offers rare insight into a literary legend.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Release date: Apr 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781797118628

Alice Walker

Alice Walker (b. 1944), one of the United States’ preeminent writers, is an award-winning author of novels, stories, essays, and poetry. In 1983, Walker became the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction with her novel The Color Purple, which also won the National Book Award. Her other novels include The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Meridian, The Temple of My Familiar, and Possessing the Secret of Joy. In her public life, Walker has worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual.

Reviews for Gathering Blossoms Under Fire

[Elona Shannon · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Very slow. Although I can appreciate the great author that she is this particular book was a little boring.

[Rosemary Banks · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Walker is unafraid to be naked before the world. Incredibly revealing insight into one of the greatest and most empathetic writers of the twentieth century, and plus she’s very human!

Thank you for sharing your most intimate life, Alice Walker, and for having the courage to live a complicated life of the highest convictions.

For writers, and readers who love writers, this is a must read!