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"For my people everywhere
Singing their slave songs repeatedly
Their dirges and ditties
Their blues and jubilees..."
Margaret Walker
For My People: The Life and Writing of Margaret Walker gives the long-overdue recognition to one of the seminal figures of American literature. Margaret Walker has been described by scholar Jerry Ward as "a national treasure" and by Nikki Giovanni as the "most famous person nobody knows." Her signature poem, For My People, written when she was 22, set a tone and a level of commitment which African American literature has been responding to ever since.
For My People combines conversations with Margaret Walker, commentary from leading scholars and readings from her poetry to make a powerful argument for the centrality of her work to 20th century American literature. At the heart of her poetry are the rhythms of African and African American speech and music - gospel, spiritual,  • LAWRENCE – After her poem “For My People” propelled Margaret Walker to fame in1937, while she was in her early 20s, she was considered a peer by nearly every important African American writer and thinker of the mid-20th century, from Langston Hughes to John Hope Franklin. But Walker’s fame waned while she raised four children and toiled in academia at a historically black college in the South. Her later-in-life, headline-grabbing literary and legal disputes with two of the leading Black male writers of her day, Richard Wright and Alex Haley, only reinforced to her the intersectional disadvantage – Black and female – that she fought against her whole life.
So why does her biographer call Margaret Walker "the most important person that nobody knows," and what can the first major biography of Walker do to enhance her legacy? “Margaret Walker is every woman who is brilliant, who has ideas, but who is ahead of her time,” said Maryemma Graham, Distinguished Professor of English at • A key figure in Chicago’s African American movement, Margaret Walker was born in Alabama in 1915. Her father was a minister who made sure that his daughter learned about philosophy and ingrained in her a love of poetry from a very early age. They moved to New Orleans where Walker went to school before heading for the city lights of Chicago. She graduated from Northwestern University in 1935 and began working at the Federal Writer’s Project. In 1942 Walker published the poetry collection For My People which won the highly regarded Yale Younger Poets Award. She was one of the first African American writers to win such an award and also one of the youngest ever to be published. For My People was a collection of lengthy ballads that introduced the characters of black people to the general public. From pimp Papa Chicken to Molly Means, the New Orleans witch, her verse fryst vatten packed with colorful imagery and sympathetic characters who prevail despite the cards that are stacked against t
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