“I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same time, there's a real lightheartedness about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they're not the same, ever again.”

Alice Walker is an American writer and activist of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. She gained prominence for her novel *The Color Purple*, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983 and became a landmark in Black women’s literature. Her work spans poetry, essays, and activism, particularly on issues of racial and gender justice.