1. Possessing the Secret of Joyrd 2. Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth 3.Anything We Love Can Be Saved 4. Living by the Word Alice Walker (b. 1944) is an American writer, poet, and activist known for her insightful portrayal of African American life and culture. Her 1982 novel The Color Purple was the subject of a major motion picture and Broadway musical. Critics celebrated Walker’s controversial fifth novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), about the practice of female genital mutilation in certain African, Asian, and Middle Eastern cultures. Writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Tina McElroy Ansa said that taking on such a taboo subject showed Walker’s depth and range. The critic also felt that her portrait of the suffering of Tashi—a character from The Color Purple—is “stunning.” And Donna Haisty Winchell wrote in her Dictionary of Literary Biography essay that this novel is “much more concise, more controlled, and more successful as art” than The Temple of My Familiar, and demonstrates an effective blend of “art and activism.” In her book Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism (1997), Walker details her own political and social struggle. In 2003, she published Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth, which includes poems that engage with the attacks on New York and Washington, DC. In Living by the Word, “Walker casts her abiding obsession with the oneness of the universe in a question: Do creativity, love and spiritual wholeness still have a chance of winning the human heart amid political forcehs bent on destroying the universe with poisonous chemicals and nuclear weapons?” Walker explores this question through journal entries and essays that engage with Native Americans, racism in China, a lonely horse, smoking, and response to the criticism leveled against both the novel and the film version of The Color Purple. Living by the Word “is not only vintage Alice Walker: passionate, political, personal, and poetic, it also provides a panoramic view of a fine human being saving her soul through good deeds and extraordinary writing.”