This image is the cover for the book Once

Once

Alice Walker’s first published book collects poems written as a student and on her first visit to Africa

For readers seeking the origins of Alice Walker’s potent, distinctive voice, this collection will provide ample insight. Composed while she was still a student at Sarah Lawrence College in the late 1960s, these poems are already engaged with some of the moral dilemmas that have defined Walker’s entire career. Luminous vignettes from her first trip to Africa give way to reflections on the flourishing civil rights movement, while an eye for the transformative power of love and beauty run through all twenty-seven entries. Walker’s talents are prodigious, yet it’s her pure moral and aesthetic clarity that impress most in this debut work. 

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Alice Walker including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

Alice Walker

Alice Walker (b. 1944), one of the United States’ preeminent writers, is an award-winning author of novels, stories, essays, and poetry. In 1983, Walker became the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction with her novel The Color Purple, which also won the National Book Award. Her other novels include The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Meridian, The Temple of My Familiar, and Possessing the Secret of Joy. In her public life, Walker has worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual.

Open Road Integrated Media