Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on July 7, 1915. Her father, Sigismund, was a Methodist minister born in Jamaica and educated at Northwestern University; her mother, Marion Dozier, a music teacher. Both later taught at New Orleans University. In 1925, they moved to New Orleans and lived with Walker’s maternal grandmother, Elvira “Vyry” Dozier, who provided many of the stories used in her only novel, Jubilee (1966). After two years at New Orleans University (now Dillard University) Walker received her bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University in 1935. She then worked in Chicago for the Federal Writers’ Project and became part of what came to be known as the black Chicago renaissance, often associated with the novelist Richard Wright. Her friendship with him ended acrimoniously after he moved to New York. She continued to help him with the research for his celebrated novel Native Son (1940) after he left Chicago. She earned her master’s degree at the University of Iowa, with the poetry collection that was published as For My People, which won the Yale Younger Poets Award (1942). She married Firnist James Alexander in 1943, and they had four children. She taught at Livingstone College and West Virginia State College before moving to a permanent position at Jackson State University, where she taught from 1949 to 1979. In 1962, she took leave from her teaching position to work on a doctorate at Iowa. Her dissertation was based on the stories told by her grandmother and on the research she had conducted in the South for thirty years. She earned her degree in 1965 and the novel was published a year later as Jubilee. During this time, she continued writing poetry, including Ballad of the Free (1966)—a chapbook—and Prophets for a New Day (1970), both of which concern the civil rights movement, and October Journey (1973), primarily a collection of celebrations of black historical and literary figures, including a long memorial to her father. At Jackson State in 1968, she established the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People. In 1973, she organized the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival through the Institute; it brought together twenty African American women poets of different generations. For Folkways Records in 1975, she recorded three albums of poetry by African American artists, including her own version of “Yalluh Hammuh,” which she had collected as part of the Federal Writers Project. In 1989, she published This is My Century: New and Collected Poems. Her most controversial work is Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (1987), which many reviewers have seen as an attack on her former friend, even though she adds significant detail to his early career in Chicago. She died of cancer on November 30, 1998.
