Poet, novelist, essayist, orator, and literary critic, Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander has lived a full, long life, seeking personal and professional acquaintances with writers from virtually every literary period of the twentieth century. She counts among those significant to her, and whose work she admires, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and Alice Walker.

Margaret Walker was born in 1915 in Birmingham, Alabama, and her educated parents expected her to excel. Her father, Sigismund Walker, immigrated from Jamaica Buff Bay, Jamaica, to study for the ministry; he attended Tuskegee Institute for a time but left because of his disagreement with Booker T. Washington's conservative philosophy that industrial and vocational education was the best that African Americans should hope to attain. In 1913 he received a degree from Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta. Both he and Walker's mother -- Marion Dozier, a music...