SOURCE: Walker, Alice. “Turning into Love: Some Thoughts on Surviving and Meeting Langston Hughes.” Callaloo 12, no. 4 (fall 1989): 663-66.

In the following essay, the transcript of a lecture given by poet Alice Walker during the Langston Hughes Festival in 1989, Walker describes her relationship with Hughes.

If it had not been for the poet Muriel Rukeyser, who was my teacher at Sarah Lawrence in 1965, I would never have met Langston Hughes. It was she who gave him my short story, To Hell With Dying; she who understood the trauma and insight that was at the root of it; she who—in her rather hearty, absent-minded friendliness—was determined to support me as a young writer. She also introduced me to her own agent, Monica McCall, and told me to send my first batch of poems from my book, Once, to The New Yorker, a magazine I'd never read.

Years afterwards...