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Gathering Blossoms Under Fire

The Journals of Alice Walker

Alice Walker author Valerie Boyd editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Orion Publishing Co

Publishing:3rd Apr '25

£18.99

This title is due to be published on 3rd April, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Gathering Blossoms Under Fire cover

'These journals are a revelation, a road map and a gift to us all' TAYARI JONES, author of An American Marriage

'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' THE TELEGRAPH

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple, Gathering Blossoms Under Fire presents four decades' worth of personal journals to offer a passionate, intimate record of Alice Walker's intellectual, artistic and political development.

Walker writes in an unvarnished and singular voice about an astonishing array of events: marching in Mississippi with civil rights foot soldiers, marrying a Jewish lawyer and defying 1960s anti-interracial marriage laws, writing her first novel, experiencing the trials and triumphs of the women's movement, being both admired and maligned for her work and activism, burying her mother and estrangement from her daughter. Her journals reveal an inextricable intertwining of the personal and political, exploring her thoughts and feelings in real time as a woman, writer, African American, wife, daughter, mother, lover, sister, friend and citizen of the world.

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 -- TAYARI JONES, author of AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE
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 -- HONORÉE FANONNE JEFFERS, author of THE LOVE SONGS OF W.E.B. DUBOIS
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 * DAILY TELEGRAPH *
[An] impressive compendium. Walker's fans are in for a treat * PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY *
An intimate glimpse into an important writer's life * KIRKUS *

ISBN: 9781780228273

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 41g

560 pages