Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful Read Free

sneakers.
    I like to imagine Yoko
    making this white boy deal with the word NO
    for the first time.
    And the word YES forever.
    I like to think of this brave
    and honest
    new age family
    that dared to sing itself
    even as anger, fear, sadness and death
    squeezed its vocal cords.
    Yoko knows the sounds of a woman coming
    are finer by far than those of a B-52
    on a bombing raid.
    And a Kotex plastered across
    a man’s forehead at dinner
    can indicate serenity.
    Hold on world
    World hold on
    It’s gonna be all right
    You gonna see the light
    (Ohh) when you’re one
    Really one
    You get things done
    Like they never been done
    So hold on.*
    Surely the earth can be saved
    by all the people
    who insist
    on love.
    Surely the earth can be saved for us.
    * From “Hold On John” by John Lennon.

A Biography of Alice Walker
    Alice Walker (b. 1944), one of the United States’ preeminent writers, is an award-winning author of novels, stories, essays, and poetry. Walker was the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which she won in 1983 for her novel The Color Purple , also a National Book Award winner. Walker has also contributed to American culture as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual. In both her writing and her public life, Walker has worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty.
    Walker was born at home in Putnam County, Georgia, on February 9, 1944, the eighth child of Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker. Willie Lee and Minnie Lou labored as tenant farmers, and Minnie Lou supplemented the family income as a house cleaner. Though poor, Walker’s parents raised her to appreciate art, nature, and beauty. They also taught her to value her education, encouraging her to focus on her studies. When she was a young girl, Alice’s brother accidentally shot her in the eye with a BB, leaving a large scar and causing her to withdraw into the world of art and books. Walker’s dedication to learning led her to graduate from her high school as valedictorian. She was also homecoming queen.
    Walker began attending Spelman College in Atlanta in 1961. There she formed bonds with professors such as Staughton Lynd and Howard Zinn, teachers that would inspire her to pursue her talent for writing and her commitment to social justice. In 1964 she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, where she completed a collection of poems in her senior year. This collection would later become her first published book, Once (1965). After college, Walker became deeply engaged with the civil rights movement, often joining marches and voter registration drives in the South. In 1965 she met Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a civil rights lawyer, whom she would marry in 1967 in New York. The two were happy, before the strain of being an interracial couple in Mississippi caused them to separate in 1976. They had one child, Rebecca Grant Walker Leventhal.
    In the late sixties through the seventies, Walker produced several books, including her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), and her first story collection, In Love & Trouble (1973). During this time she also pursued a number of other ambitions, such as working as an editor for Ms. magazine, assisting anti-poverty campaigns, and helping to bring canonical novelist Zora Neale Hurston back into the public eye.
    With the 1982 release of her third novel, The Color Purple , Walker earned a reputation as one of America’s premier authors. The book would go on to sell fifteen million copies and be adapted into an Academy Award–nominated film by director Steven Spielberg. After the publication of The Color Purple , Walker had a tremendously prolific decade. She produced a number of acclaimed novels, including You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (1982), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), as well as the poetry collections Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1985) and Her Blue Body Everything