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Alice Walker Research Paper

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It was in Eatonton, Georgia, in 1944, that a famous poet, essayist, and novelist was born: Alice Walker. Alice Walker was born to a poor family of nine, she was the youngest out of all of siblings. Being the youngest child out of all your siblings can be a blessing and a curse, you can have two sides of the spectrum, either you are spoiled or you get hand me down things from your older siblings.But because she was born into a poor family, she got the short end of the stick. Her parents were sharecroppers and her mother also worked as a maid so she could support her family. Growing up wasn’t easy for Walker, not only did she have a poor upbringing but she also had an injury happen at a young age. At the age of 8 Walker was playing with her two …show more content…
A lot of her poetry is influenced by her being an activist and being someone who fights for human rights. She addresses many different themes in her work, but overall Alice Walker writes about race relations, our relationships to God, African history, and human sexuality. Her work is influenced by and often responding to current racial and gender issues in the world. Alice Walker rarely uses rhyme in her poetry, but instead she includes syntax, euphony and repetition to make her poetry sound rhythmic, for example in her poem "Be Nobody's Darling". She generally writes her poems in the first-person perspective, in which she addresses the reader about a certain theme. The style in which Alice Walker writes her poems is usually in a long piece of text, with a few large stanzas made up of very short lines. Alice Walker is an amazing poet who uses all her life experiences for the benefit of her writing. She is not just a novelist, a poet, an activist, she is a strong african american woman whose work has inspired many people. “What is the work that I do? Some people, when you say that you’re a writer, they just think in terms of how many books you’ve written, how many this and how many thats. But for me, writing has always been about freedom. It has been about seeing the possibility for people to outgrow whatever is keeping them down, and whatever is keeping them smaller than they need to be.”-Alice

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