Monday Muse: Alice Walker Documentary

The most common way people give up their power

is by thinking they don't have any.

~ Alice Walker

Alice Walker, the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction (for 1982's The Color Purple), is the subject of Beauty in Truth (Kali Films, Ltd.), a feature documentary by writer, director, and producer Pratibha Parmar. Beauty in Truth had its world premiere at the March 2013 Women of the World (WOW) Festival in London; it premiered in the United States, in Oakland, California, in November 2013. More recently, the documentary was shown on February 7 on PBS.

Beauty in Truth tells Walker's extraordinary story ― from her birth as the eighth child of sharecroppers, to her celebration as a best-selling writer, to her anti-war activism, and, ultimately, to her acknowledgment as a human rights advocate and humanitarian who in 2010 received the LennonOno Peace Award. The film includes interviews with Walker's siblings, feminist Gloria Steinem, director Steven Spielberg, director Quincy Jones, and actor Danny Glover.

Winner of a National Book Award and a Guggenheim fellowship and an inductee into both the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame and the California Hall of Fame, Walker is a poet, short story writer, novelist, children's author, essayist, memoirist, and nonfiction writer. Her most recent published work includes The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness Into Flowers - New Poems (The New Press, April 2013) and The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm's Way (The New Press, April 2013).

Here's a sneak peek at the documentary:

Alice Walker Film Trailer on Vimeo and PBS (Other clips are found at the PBS link.)

During the film's world premiere, Walker and Parmar sat for this interesting interview:

Ken Williams, "Alice Walker Reflects on a Life of Writing", Bay State Banner, February 5, 2014

Meredith May, "A Rigorous Look a Writer Alice Walker's Life", SFGate, February 4, 2014

Alice Walker Film on FaceBook and Twitter

Alice Walker Film Blog

Note: Sunday, February 9, was Walker's 70th birthday. Englewood Review of Books marked the occasion with four videos of Walker reading her poems.