Photo: Virginia DeBolt, CC BY-SA 2.0 — Source
American novelist, short story writer, and poet who won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for 'The Color Purple' (1982), an epistolary novel about a Black woman's struggle for empowerment in the rural American South. She coined the term 'womanism' as an alternative to feminism that centers the experiences of Black women. She was active in the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi and was one of the first to bring Zora Neale Hurston's work back to public attention. Her writing addresses race, gender, spirituality, and social justice with deep empathy and unflinching honesty.
Source: Poetry Foundation