Our author will be Alice Walker and our readings will be eight of her short stories from her first collection, In Love & Trouble (Harper One, 1973). Walker was both a writer and a civil rights activist from the South during and following Martin Luther King’s years of leadership, and I thought these stories might be illuminating as fictional portraits of Southern Black women’s lives from that era. Alice Walker (1944) is a distinguished contemporary American author of seventeen novels and short story collections, seven volumes of poetry, five books of nonfiction essays, and three children’s stories. For her best-known novel The Color Purple (1982), she was awarded both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. The 1985 film adaptation was directed by Steven Spielberg. A prominent feminist activist, Walker was an editor of Ms. magazine. She played an important role in the revival of interest in Zora Neale Hurston, and it was Walker (together with writer Charlotte Hunt) who in 1973 designated an unmarked grave in the Fort Pierce, Florida cemetery as Hurston’s. (Walker had a permanent gravestone made for it and wrote the inscription.) One of our stories, “The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff,” was written “in grateful memory of Zora Neale Hurston.”