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The Black Women’s Studies Association invites you to join us for an author talkback with Alice Walker and Jacinta Saffold! This event is free and open to the public. Donations are encouraged. Please register below to receive a Zoom link prior to the event.

Edited by the late Valerie Boyd, Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker is an enduring chronicle of the life and legacy of one of the most illustrious authors and activists of our time. For the first time, the edited journals of Alice Walker are gathered together to reflect the complex, passionate, talented, and acclaimed Pulitzer Prize winner of The Color Purple. She intimately explores her thoughts and feelings as a woman, a writer, an African-American, a wife, a daughter, a mother, a lover, a sister, a friend, a citizen of the world.

In an unvarnished and singular voice, she explores an astonishing array of events: marching in Mississippi with other foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr.; her marriage to a Jewish lawyer, defying laws that barred interracial marriage in the 1960s South; an early miscarriage; writing her first novel; the trials and triumphs of the Women’s Movement; erotic encounters and enduring relationships; the ancestral visits that led her to write The Color Purple; winning the Pulitzer Prize; being admired and maligned, sometimes in equal measure, for her work and her activism; and burying her mother. A powerful blend of Walker’s personal life with political events, this revealing collection offers rare insight into a literary legend.

Biographies:

Alice Walker, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, is a canonical figure in American letters. She is the author of The Color Purple, The Temple of My Familiar, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, and many other works of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Her writings have been translated into more than two dozen languages, and more than fifteen million copies of her books have been sold worldwide.

Dr. Jacinta Saffold is co-founder and treasurer of the Black Women’s Studies Association. She is also an Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Orleans. She received her Ph.D. from the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with certificates in African Diaspora Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research interests coalesce around 20th and 21st century African American literature, Hip Hop Studies, and the Digital Humanities. Currently, she is working on her first manuscript, Books & Beats: The Cultural Kinship of Street Lit and Hip Hop. She also has extensive experience as a scholar-administrator with emphases on enrollment management, inclusive diversity, and student success. Ultimately, she is committed to widening access for minority students and shifting the culture in higher education to be more inclusive through a prism of African American literature and culture.