Margaret Walker was born in 1917 in Atlanta, Georgia. She earned her undergraduate degree at Spelman College in 1937 and earned her MFA from the University of Iowa in 1945. Walker's first poem, "The New Negro," was published in 1947, but she did not receive widespread recognition until the publication of her novel, Jubilee, in 1954. Her collection of poems Powerhouse won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1969
Her other major works include The Black America Speaks (1972), A Long Sigh (1988), and The First Word (1999). Her many honors include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Whiting Award for Interracial Literature, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Walker received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEA grant for poetry.
She died on September 18, 2007 at the age of eighty-nine.
When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book.Margaret Walker
I'd rather make a good run than a bad stand.Margaret Walker
Friends and good manners will carry you where money won't go.Margaret Walker
The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.Margaret Walker
