A  TRIBUTE  to  MARGARET  WALKER

by Maryemma Graham

The Margaret Walker Creative Writing Award is named after one of America’s foremost writers of poetry, fiction and cultural criticism.  A lifelong member of the College Language Association, Walker taught at historically black colleges her entire life. 

Born in Birmingham, AL in 1915, Walker grew up in New Orleans, where she received her early education before going on to complete college at Northwestern University and graduate school at the University of Iowa. 

Walker’s career as a poet paralleled the rise of Chicago as a black literary capital—which we refer to now as the Chicago Renaissance – and Walker, like Richard Wright, was one of its major voices. Writing and living among other artists and intellectuals, many of whom identified with the radical left, Walker developed a distinctive poetic sensibility that combined modernist techniques with a highly visible African American consciousness.

 In 1942, Walker published her first volume of verse after winning the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and became the first African-American writer ever to win a national literary prize:  For My People set a high standard for black poetry because of its heightened social awareness and innovative forms.  In it are included such well known poems as “Lineage,” “We Have Been Believers,” “Delta,” “The Struggle Staggers Us,” and the best known title poem, “For My People.”   She was particularly effective in her recreation of the rural folk voice in poems such as “Yallah Hammuh,” “Long John Nelson and Sweetie Pie,” and “Bad-Man Stagolee.”  Walker demonstrated that she was a skillful artist who could alternate between short lyrics, odes, and sonnets as well as longer narrative poems and ballads. The volume immediately made Margaret Walker a household name. 

Teaching at Jackson State University from 1949 to 1978 gave Walker an opportunity to influence multiple generations of future teachers, writers, and actors, and to have a major impact on the shape and development of the Black Studies Movement.

In 1966, after working on her novel for 30 years, Walker published her award-winning Jubilee (1966), a novelized slave narrative that launched the “neo-slave narrative” that has since dominated fiction writing in America.

Over the course of a half century, Walker published a dozen books and monographs. In addition to For My People (1942), she wrote four more volumes of poetry:  Prophets for a New Day (1970), October Journey (1973), For Farish Street (1987), and This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems (1989).  Walker also published a biography (Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius in 1988), criticism, and creative non-fiction, including A Poetic Equation: Conversations between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker (1974), How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature (1990)--which contained the hallmark essay she had published previously in 1972--and a final book of essays: On Being Female, Black and Free (1997), in which Walker expresses a decidedly feminist perspective.  After her death, Conversations with Margaret Walker was published (2002). 

Walker was an extremely popular “speaker-poet” and continued the legacy of writing and speaking in a prophetic voice to large, enthusiastic audiences throughout the United States. Becoming famous never affected her ability to move comfortably among common, everyday people for whom she had the greatest respect and for and to whom she wrote.

After an extended illness, Walker died in Chicago in 1998 and is buried in Jackson, MS. She received awards from the states of Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, and Illinois as well as the federal government and countless honorary degrees and recognitions.  Before she died, she left her papers, manuscripts, and unpublished work to Jackson State University, where they became part of the newly renamed Margaret Walker Alexander National Research Center, originally founded by her as the Institute for the Study of the Life, History, and Culture of the Twentieth Century African American in 1968, the first Black Studies research center in the United States and the only one in the South. 

The CLA creative writing award honors Walker’s contributions to the growth and development of African American literature as a rigorous and highly respected field of study and to her life as a creative writer, teacher and  scholar who maintained a fighting spirit as an engaged public intellectual.  The Margaret Walker Creative Writing Award has been given annually since 1994. Its main purpose is to recognize and cultivate new talent within the CLA community and carries with it the spirit of the words to Margaret Walker’s poem “. . . Let a new world be born . . . Let a second generation full of courage issue forth . . . Let a race of men [and women] now rise and take control.”

             

Eudora Welty and Margaret Walker