You may know our new author, Alice Walker, as the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Color Purple.  Walker was born in Georgia in 1944.  Her parents were sharecroppers and she was the youngest of 8 children.  She attended Spelman and then Sarah Lawrence college.  An activist for social justice, after college Walker worked on behalf of voter registration drives and participated in the famous 1963 march on Washington.  Her biographer in The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature (my source for this post) notes that Walker has written in every genre and that her writing “demonstrates a remarkable grasp of the political realities of systematic oppression.”

The title of the essay we read echoes a song, “Am I Blue?” made famous by Billie Holiday (1915-1959).  The essay invites readers to think about connections between its project, the song, and the life of Holiday.