Alice Walker was born in Georgia in 1944, the youngest of eight children. Her parents were tenant farmers, and Walker grew up in extreme poverty during a time of violent racism. At the age of eight, she was accidentally blinded in one eye by a stray BB pellet while playing with her brothers. Self-conscious of the scar the accident left, Walker became depressed, and she withdrew. "I no longer felt like the little girl I was. I felt old . . . I retreated into solitude, and read stories and began to write poems." But Walker's retreat didn't last long. After high school she received a scholarship to attend Spelman College in Atlanta. She became active in the Civil Rights movement and was invited to the home of Dr. Martin Luther King. She was also present for his "I Have a Dream" speech. Before beginning her junior year at Spelman, she learned she had received a scholarship to attend Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Although reluctant to put aside her participation in the movement, Walker did become one of the small group of African Americans to attend the distinguished university. There, she thrived under the mentorship of poet Muriel Ruykeyser and writer Jane Cooper. In 1965 she published her first short story.

On graduating from college, Walker again became active in the Civil Rights movement, going door-to-door to register Georgia's rural poor to vote. In the years to come, she continued to be a dedicated and outspoken activist, always ready to champion the rights of the oppressed. She began teaching, creating one of the nation's first women's studies courses at Wellesley College. She also continued to write, publishing poetry, novels, and essays. Walker won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for her novel The Color Purple, published in 1982. "Women" is from her third volume of poetry, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, which was published in 1984.