Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker to speak at KU Jan. 31

LAWRENCE -- Noted novelist, poet and essayist Alice Walker presents the third installment of the 2001-2002 Humanities Lecture Series at 7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 31, at the Lied Center at the University of Kansas. The Office of the Chancellor co-sponsors the free event. Tickets are available starting at 5:45 p.m. Jan. 31 in front of the Lied Center. Doors open at 6 p.m.

The lecture is titled "Remembering Langston" and is a precursor to the Langston Hughes symposium at KU Feb. 7 to 10.

Walker, who was born in Georgia, attended Spelman College in Atlanta and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in New York. She rose to worldwide acclaim after her novel "The Color Purple" was published in 1982. She received the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for fiction for the book. Other awards include a creative writing award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts & Letters, a National Book Award nomination and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In addition to being a prolific writer, Walker has been an activist for more than 30 years. She is committed to such causes as environmentalism, the anti-nuclear movement, civil rights and the women's movement.

Her published work includes three collections of short stories, "In Love and Trouble" (1973), "You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down" (1981) and "The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart" (2000); four volumes of poetry, "Once" (1968), "Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems" (1973), "Goodnight Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning" (1979) and "Horses Make Landscapes Look More Beautiful" (1984); three collections of essays, "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" (1983), "Living by the Word" (1988) and "Anything We Loved Can Be Saved" (1997); two children's books, "Langston Hughes: American Poet" (1974) and "To Hell with Dying" (1988); and six novels, "The Third Life of Grange Copeland" (1970), "Meridian" (1976), "The Color Purple" (1982), "The Temple of My Familiar" (1989), "Possessing the Secret of Joy" (1992) and "By the Light of My Father's Smile" (1998).