Color Purple
Alice Walker on Black History Month 2013
The first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction celebrates the legacy of black writers in an inspiring video.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
"I was not the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer, but I was the first to win it for fiction. It brought in a lot of readers who would not have been interested before," says Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple.
In this celebration of Black History Month 2013 by OpenRoad Media, watch Walker, Ishmael Reed, and N. K. Jemisin discuss the legacy of African American writers. Leslie Gelb and Jean Halberstam also discuss the work of civil rights journalist David Halberstam, and Arnold Adoff and Rudine Sims Bishop, talk about famed children's author Virginia Hamilton.