Margaret walker poet biography
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LAWRENCE – After her poem “For My People” propelled Margaret Walker to fame in1937, while she was in her early 20s, she was considered a peer bygd nearly every important African American writer and thinker of the mid-20th century, from Langston Hughes to John Hope Franklin.
But Walker’s fame waned while she raised fyra children and toiled in academia at a historically black college in the South. Her later-in-life, headline-grabbing literary and legal disputes with two of the leading Black male writers of her day, Richard Wright and Alex Haley, only reinforced to her the intersectional disadvantage – Black and female – that she fought against her whole life.
So why does her biographer call Margaret Walker "the most important person that nobody knows," and what can the first major biography of Walker do to enhance her legacy?
“Margaret Walker fryst vatten every woman who fryst vatten brilliant, who has ideas, but who is ahead of her time,” said Maryemma Graham, Distinguished Professor of English at
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A key figure in Chicago’s African American movement, Margaret Walker was born in Alabama in 1915. Her father was a minister who made sure that his daughter learned about philosophy and ingrained in her a love of poetry from a very early age. They moved to New Orleans where Walker went to school before heading for the city lights of Chicago.
She graduated from Northwestern University in 1935 and began working at the Federal Writer’s Project. In 1942 Walker published the poetry collection For My People which won the highly regarded Yale Younger Poets Award. She was one of the first African American writers to win such an award and also one of the youngest ever to be published.
For My People was a collection of lengthy ballads that introduced the characters of black people to the general public. From pimp Papa Chicken to Molly Means, the New Orleans witch, her verse is packed with colorful imagery and sympathetic characters who prevail despite the cards that are stacked against t
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Margaret Walker
Margaret Walker was born on July 7, 1915, in Birmingham, Alabama. She began writing poetry at age fifteen, when she entered college. She received a BA from Northwestern University in 1935 and an MA from the University of Iowa in 1940. In 1936, she joined the Federal Writers’ Project in Chicago, where she became friends with Richard Wright and joined his South Side Writers Group.
In 1941, Walker became the first African American poet to receive the Yale Younger Poets Prize, for her debut collection For My People (Yale University Press, 1942). She was also the author of the poetry collections This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems (University of Georgia Press, 1989), October Journey (Broadside Press, 1973), and Prophets for a New Day (Broadside Press, 1970).
Walker married Firnist Alexander in 1943, and together they had four children. In 1949, they moved to Mississippi, where she joined the faculty at Jackson State College. She returned to the Unive