Join us for our next book in the Rubber Banned Book Club!

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE, CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED BESTSELLER

The Color Purple won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983, making Walker the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer for fiction. A feminist work about an abused and uneducated Black woman’s struggle for empowerment, The Color Purple was praised for the depth of its female characters and for its use of Black English Vernacular. An epistolary novel composed of letters written by two sisters.  In 1983 she told The New York Times that the letter form worked best because “It was…a way of solving a technical problem of having characters in George and Africa. They never actually get the letters, but that’s beside the point. By writing, they drew closer.”

In writing the book, Walker was inspired by the experience of her grandparents, with whom she had lived for a year in rural Georgia when she was a child. In a 2015 TimesTalk interview, she said of her grandparents, “They were so kind, so giving. In the early days, they were terrible, terrible people. So I began to wonder, how could people who were so wonderful, when I knew them, be terrible when I didn’t know them? That made me realize there was some reclamation to be done.”

Source: Brittanica.com

WHY WAS THIS BOOK BANNED IN SOME SCHOOLS & STATES?

The Color Purple has been challenged multiple times since it published. The book has been banned from school libraries in the United States between 1984 to 2025. Parents are the most common group attempting to remove the novel from schools. There have been different reasons for the book being banned, including religious objections, homosexuality, violence, African history, rape, incest, drug abuse, explicit language, and sexual scenes. In 2017, The Color Purple was successfully banned from all Texas State Prisons for explicit language and graphic depictions of violence.

When asked about her feelings regarding the banning of her work, Alice Walker said: “I had delivered my gift. It was given in complete love to everyone. If they wanted to keep it, it would have to be their work to fight for it.”

Source: bannedbooks.library.cmu.edu

HOW DOES THE CLUB WORK?
Admission is free. Registration required. There are 2 sessions per book. Professional artists read sections of the book and members discuss.

Jan 28, 2025 (6:30-8:00pm) – in person @ 5627 N Lincoln, Chicago.
Feb 25, 2025 (6:30-8:00pm CT) – meet via Zoom.

CREATIVE TEAM

ALICE WALKER (born February 9, 1944, Eatonton, Georgia) is an internationally celebrated writer, poet and activist whose books include seven novels, four collections of short stories, four children’s books, and volumes of essays and poetry.  She won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1983 and the National Book Award.

Walker has written many  bestsellers; among them, The Temple of My Familiar (a wisdom tale that originates in prehistory);  By The Light of My Father’s Smile ( sexuality and forgiveness as paths of healing); Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), which explores the effects of female genital mutilation on one woman’s psyche as well as her body (she becomes a patient of a fictional Carl Jung). This novel led to the 1993 book and documentary film Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women, both collaborations with British-Indian filmmaker Pratibha Parmar, and We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness. (Meditations on spiritual and political issues).

Her other novels are: The Third Life of Grange Copeland (one family’s struggle to survive the  sharecropping system – slavery under another name – in the South), Meridian (a spiritual biography of The Civil Rights Movement), The Color Purple (liberation from enforced, male dominant, religion and thought; also poses the question never asked by societies in which they occur:  what becomes of the children whose parents are lynched/assassinated?) and Now Is the Time To Open Your Heart (a couple on the verge of separating decides to live together,  fully in the present, despite  awareness of the universal unraveling of societies around the globe).

Her short story collections include: In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women  ( poor and marginalized women of color make choices reflecting their status in life) and You Can’t Keep A Good Woman Down  (the spirit of woman rises with the smallest encouragement; one of our most valuable human contributions) and The Way Forward Is With A Broken Heart (after a painful divorce, a woman opens herself to the heartbreak offered by the world,  and loves the world enough to persevere).

There are seven volumes of poems. Among them: Once, Revolutionary Petunias, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You In the Morning, Her Blue Body Everything We Know, Absolute Trust In the Goodness of the Earth, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, and The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness Into Flowers.

In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose examines the creative inheritance of one’s maternal line, and how our own contributions,whether political, activist, or poetic connect on this foundation. Essays in Living By the Word  reflect Walker’s Earth and Womanist based spirituality.  Anything We Love Can Be Saved:  A Writer’s Activism ( explores activism as a source of inspiration), The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult chronicles the adventure of having a film made of her novel The Color Purple and weathering storms of censorship, banning, criticism, and verbal attack.

Her work has been translated into more than two dozen languages, and her books have sold more than fifteen million copies. Along with the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Walker, in 2006,  was honored as one of the inaugural inductees into the California Hall of Fame. In 2007, her archives were opened to the public at Emory University in her birth state of Georgia. In 2010 she presented the keynote address at The 11th Annual Steve Biko Lecture at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, where she met the beautiful sons of Steve Biko, and was awarded the Lennon/Ono Peace Grant in Reykjavik, Iceland, where she met John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “beautiful boy” Sean Lennon. (Walker donated this latter award to an orphanage for the children of AIDS victims in East Africa, The Margaret Okari Foundation in Kisi, Kenya).  She served as jurist  (2010 and 2012)for two sessions of The Russell Tribunal on Palestine.  In Cape Town, South Africa, and NYC, New York.

Recent works are: Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel; Hard Times Require Furious Dancing; The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker; and The Chicken Chronicles: Sitting With the Angels Who Have Returned With My Memories, a Memoir. She also writes regularly on her blog site at alicewalkersgarden.com.

Two new books were presented in Spring of 2013:  The Cushion in the Road:  Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm’s Way; and The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers,  poems.

Walker has been an activist all of her adult life, and believes that learning to extend the range of our compassion is activity and work available to all. She is a staunch defender not only of human rights, but of the rights of all living beings. She is one of the world’s most prolific writers, yet continues to travel the world to literally stand on the side of the poor, and the economically, spiritually and politically oppressed. She also stands, however, on the side of the revolutionaries, teachers and leaders who seek change and transformation of the world. Upon returning from Gaza in 2008, Walker said, “Going to Gaza was our opportunity to remind the people of Gaza and ourselves that we belong to the same world: the world where grief is not only acknowledged, but shared; where we see injustice and call it by its name; where we see suffering and know the one who stands and sees is also harmed, but not nearly so much as the one who stands and sees and says and does nothing.”

Alice Walker was awarded the Mahmoud Darwish Literary Prize for Fiction 2016.

Alice Walker was awarded the Haydée Santamaria Medal by presidential decree at Casa de Las Americas in Havana, Cuba in February of 2024

JOSLYN JONES is a proud Ensemble member of American Blues Theater. Credits include Flyin’ West (American Blues Theater) Steel Magnolias (Theatre at the Center); Intimate Apparel (Theatre Squared); ANDROMEDA (Theatre Squared); The Project(s) (American Theater Company) Jeff Nomination, Best Production; The Delany Sisters: Having Our Say – The First Hundred Years (Fleetwood Jourdain Theatre); Once On This Island (Marriott Lincolnshire Theatre); 12 Ophelias (Trap Door Theatre); Weekend (TimeLine Theatre), Bourbon At The Border (Eclipse Theatre) BTAA Nomination, Featured Actress; Escape (Live Bait Theatre); Flyin’ West and RAISIN (Court Theatre), Bee-Luther-Hatchee (The University Of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign); Fabulation: Or, The Re-Education of Undine (Next Theatre); Relevant Hearsay (MPACCT: Theater on the Lake); Bee-Luther-Hatchee and Smokey Joe’s Café (Open Door Theater); Meshuggah Nuns! (Chicago Jewish Theatre); The Kurt Weil Revue: Songs of Darkness and Light (Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre) Jeff Nomination, Best Musical Production; To Kill A Mockingbird (Metropolis Performing Arts Centre); 2002 Class of The School at Steppenwolf. She has understudied: Having Our Say and Crumbs From The Table of Joy (Goodman Theatre);  Film: Cherry, directed by the Russo Brothers with Tom Holland as her scene partner; Television: South Side-Mrs. Odom (HBO Max); Chicago PD (NBC). Joslyn is a proud member of Actors Equity Association and SAG-AFTRA. linktr.ee/