Who Am I? Margaret Walker Alexander

​Margaret Walker Alexander was born in Birmingham, AL in 1915 and went on to become a celebrated African-American poet and writer.  She was part of the African-American literary movement in Chicago.  Her notable works include the award-winning poem For My People (1942), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition and the award-winning novel Jubilee (1966), set in the Antebellum South during the American Civil War. During her lifetime, she had the unique opportunity both to be mentored by the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright and to be a mentor to writers such as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou.
 
Mrs. Walker Alexander became a literature professor at what is today Jackson State University, a historically black college in Jackson, MS, where she taught from 1949 to 1979. In 1968, Walker founded the Institute for the Study of History, Life, and Culture of Black People (now the Margaret Walker Alexander National Research Center); her personal papers are now held there and constitute one of the single largest collections of a modern black, female writer anywhere in the world.  In 1976, she went on to serve as the Institute's director.  She continued to visit and influence Jackson State University until her passing in 1998.

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