About this Event

Join us on Friday May 7th for an evening of a inspiring conversation with Salamishah Tillet and Lisa Ze Winters .

The Free Tickets gives you access to the virtual event. The Book Ticket includes access to the virtual event and a In Search of the Color Purple book shipped to you. If you want to pick your copy book up in store use this link to purchase and let us know to add you to the event in the comments in the order.

In Search of the Color Purple : The Story of Alice Walker’s Masterpiece , Salamishah Tillet is mixing cultural criticism, literary history, biography, and memoir, an exploration of Alice Walker’s critically acclaimed and controversial novel, The Color Purple.

Through archival research and interviews with Walker, Oprah Winfrey, and Quincy Jones (among others), Tillet studies Walker’s life and how themes of violence emerged in her earlier work. Reading The Color Purple at age 15 was a groundbreaking experience for Tillet. It continues to resonate with her—as a sexual violence survivor, as a teacher of the novel, and as an accomplished academic.

Provocative and personal, In Search of The Color Purple is a bold work from an important public intellectual, and captures Alice Walker’s seminal role in rethinking sexuality, intersectional feminism, and racial and gender politics.

About the Author

Salamishah Tillet is a scholar, cultural critic, and activist. A professor at Rutgers University–Newark and previously a professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, she is a contributing critic-at-large for the New York Times. With her sister, she cofounded A Long Walk Home, a Chicago-based national nonprofit that uses art to empower young people to end violence against girls and women. She lives in New Jersey.

In Conversation

Lisa Ze Winters is an Associate Professor of African American Studies and English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Currently, she is consumed with the day-to-day practice of mothering a Black girl in the time of now, and her current research interests center on Black motherhood and Black radical love and the possibilities therein in for imagining and enacting freedom for Black children. She is the author of The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic. You can purchase her book at this link.

Thank you Abrams for the opportunity to offer this insightful conversation.

Review:

“One of my most cherished possessions is a copy of The Color Purple, signed by Alice Walker and dated October 22, 1991. In case of fire, I keep it near my family photos to make sure it is not left behind. In Search of The Color Purple delivers extraordinary insight into both the love and the struggle that made Ms. Walker’s exquisitely crafted novel a masterpiece. After reading Salamishah Tillet’s poignant book, neither readers nor writers will forget that it takes courage and audacity to write a novel that tells the reality of women’s lives.”

— Anita Hill

“An enriching study for the novel’s many devoted readers.”

— Kirkus