Most famous for her seminal novel The Color Purple, writer-activist Alice Walker was born into a family of sharecroppers in rural Georgia in 1944. She came of age during the violent racism and seismic social changes of mid-20th-century America. Her mother, poverty and participation in the civil rights movement were the formative influences on her consciousness, becoming the inherent themes in her writing. The first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Walker continues to shine a light on global human rights issues. Her dramatic life is told with poetry and lyricism, and includes interviews with Steven Spielberg, Danny Glover, Gloria Steinem and Walker herself.