Margaret Walker was born in 1915, in Birmingham, Alabama. She was a college student at the age of 15 and began writing poetry. She received a BA from Northwestern University in 1935 and an MA from the University of Iowa in 1940. In 1936 she joined the Federal Writers’ Project in Chicago, where she became friends with Richard Wright and joined his South Side Writers Group. In 1941 Walker became the first African American poet to receive the Yale Younger Poets Prize, for her debut collection For My People. She was also the author of the poetry collections This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems, October Journey, and Prophets for a New Day. In 1949 she and her husband moved to Mississippi, where she joined the faculty at Jackson State College. She returned to the University of Iowa for her doctoral studies and received a PhD in 1965. She took the final oral exam for her degree exactly one hundred years from the day that her great-grandmother was set free from slavery. The following year, she published her dissertation as a novel, Jubilee. Walker finished her book one hundred years after the surrender at Appomattox. In 1968 Walker founded the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People at Jackson State College. As director of the institute, which was later renamed the Margaret Walker Center, she organized the 1971 National Evaluative Conference on Black Studies and the 1973 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival. After Walker retired from teaching in 1979, she published On Being Female, Black, and Free, a collection of personal essays, and Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius, a work of nonfiction informed by her friendship with Wright. Margaret Walker died of cancer on November 30, 1998, in Jackson, Mississippi.

click here