“When I was 18, I went to the Soviet Union. I kept hearing that America was planning to bomb them - lots of bombs were going to come down on these people. I went there not knowing anything, except that I thought the whole thing was stupid and that I wanted to see who these people were that we were going to bomb.”

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.