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Alice Malsenior Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an American author, self-declared feminist and womanist - the latter a term she herself coined to make special distinction for the experiences of women of color. She has written at length on issues of race and gender, and is most famous for the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the eighth child of sharecroppers. As well as being black, her family has Cherokee, Scottish and Irish lineage. Although she grew up in Georgia, she has stated that she often felt displaced there, and lives in Poretrville California on the east coast generally very squeezed. People have so many hang-ups about how other people live their lives. People always want to keep you in a little box or they need to label you and fix you in time and location. I feel a greater fluidity here. People are much more willing to accept that nothing is permanent, everything is changeable so there is freedom and I do need to live where I can be free. Alice Walker, interview with The Observer in 2001.

Biographer Evelyn C. White talks about an incident when Walker, who was eight years old at the time, was injured when her brother accidentally shot her in the eye with a BB gun. She became blind in her right eye as a result. White suggests this event had a large impact on Walker, especially when a doctor in town swindled her parents out of $250 they paid to repair her injury. Walker refers to this incident in her book Warrior Marks, a chronicle of female genital mutilation in Africa, and uses it to illustrate the sacrificial marks women bear that allow them to be "warriors" against female suppression.

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