Hard Times Require Furious Dancing by Alice Walker
Photo Credit: New World Library

My Poetry Corner September 2016 features the poem “Calling All Grand Mothers” from the poetry collection, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, by Alice Walker, an African American poet, writer, and activist.

Renowned for her Pulitzer Prize winning 1982 novel, The Color Purple, Alice Walker started her literary writing career as a poet at the age of seven or eight in the racially segregated southeastern state of Georgia. Her first poetry collection (1968) drew from her experiences in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

The title of Walker’s poetry collection caught my attention. She notes in the Preface: “I share losses, health concerns, and other challenges common to the human condition, especially in these times of war, poverty, environmental devastation, and greed that are quite beyond the most creative imagination… I have learned to dance……