GATHERING BLOSSOMS UNDER FIRE

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 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.

"[W]omen 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. Courage is the fundamental offering of these journals. Patience with the critical inner and outer voice is next. Love of growth and truth rounds out the trio."
- Alice Walker on GATHERING BLOSSOMS UNDER FIRE

Valerie Boyd is author of the award-winning Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. She is a journalism professor and the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Georgia, where she directs the low-residency MFA Program in Narrative Nonfiction.