LIVE from NYPL: ALICE WALKER and MARGO JEFFERSON: A Conversation
Please note: This event starts at 7:30 pm.
"Alice Walker has lived many lives: as poet, novelist and essayist; as civil rights fighter and "womanist," a term she coined; as Southerner, Northerner and traveler. She has been much praised and sometimes much attacked. Even as The Color Purple has made its ways from book to film to Broadway, other books and stories of hers are being censored by school boards. I want our conversation to explore these lives—how they have taken shape and direction through the years, and how they go on changing."
--Margo Jefferson
About Alice Walker:
Alice Walker won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for her third novel, The Color Purple, which was made into an internationally popular film by Steven Spielberg. Her other novels, which have been translated into more than two dozen languages, include By the Light of My Father's Smile, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and The Temple of My Familiar. Her most recent novel, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, was published in 2004. Ms. Walker is also the author of several collections of short stories, essays and poems as well as children's books. Her work has appeared in numerous national and international journals and magazines. An activist and social visionary, Ms. Walker has been a participant in most of the major movements of planetary change, among them the human and civil rights movement in the South, the hands off Cuba movement, the women's movement, the Native American and indigenous rights movement, the free South Africa movement, the environmental and animal rights movement and the peace movement. Her advocacy on behalf of the dispossessed has, in the words of her biographer, Evelyn C. White, "spanned the globe."
About Margo Jefferson:
Margo L. Jefferson was appointed critic-at-large, covering theater, at the New York Times in 1996, after having served as Sunday theater critic. Prior to joining The Times in 1993, Ms. Jefferson taught American literature, performing arts criticism, writing and English at Columbia University and before that was an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at New York University. In addition she has been an arts criticism contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a contributing editor to 7 Days magazine, and an associate editor at Newsweek magazine. Ms. Jefferson has been a contributing critic to Grand Street, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice, and Ms. magazine among many others. In 1995, Ms. Jefferson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Ms. Jefferson received a B.A. degree, cum laude, in English and American Literature from Brandeis University and an M.S. degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.