AUTHOR BIO

TEXAS TOMBOY, GEORGIA PEACH

Janet Marie Walker was born in San Antonio, Texas, and grew up in Augusta, Georgia, where she enjoyed reading novels, playing sports, visiting the public library, and studying the Bible literature of Jehovah’s Witnesses, her mother’s religion.

She is the daughter of William Edward Walker Jr. and Marie Ann Brown Walker, both of Charleston, South Carolina.

Music (recorded vinyl albums, singing, and piano-playing) was a staple in her childhood home, and she credits her parents with introducing her to the artistry of Sarah Vaughan, a singer whose voice serves as a soothing symbolic maternal fill-in to the main character in Janet’s most important novel.

College and Real Life

Miss Walker has held jobs as local newspaper reporter and copy editor; founding editor of a regional women’s magazine; TV associate producer; intern for a New York City publishing house; member of a CNN (Cable News Network) housekeeping crew; UPS package handler and delivery driver; freelance grammar editor; and cross-country truck driver.

Her life has been one of extremes, from that of a virginal missionary Bible teacher to that of the self-serving, agnostic college student; from that of a struggling single welfare mother to a privileged daughterly existence in a mini-mansion in the midst of black Atlanta's Southwest Fulton County affluence.

All of this, she says, contributed to her ability to develop rich characters and authentic experiences in her fiction.

In 1993, at Augusta State University, for submitting a sample of what would become her novel, Amazed by Her Grace, Miss Walker received the Will Shingleton and Samantha Dawes Wich scholarships for creative writing. She later became the first and second recipient of ASU’s annual Henry Lott-Walter Wiggins Communications Scholarship (provided by former Augusta resident and TV journalist Nita Wiggins). At Georgia State University, in Atlanta, Miss Walker received Ph.D.-level research training in the field of literary studies as a Ronald McNair Scholar.

Walker’s feminist critique, “The Disney Girl,” appeared in the St. Martin’s Press college text The Great American Bologna Festival and other Student Essays, beginning with the 1994 edition. From 2000 to 2004, she studied rhetoric and composition, as well as African American Studies, at Georgia State University, where she maintained a 4.0 GPA for more than two years.

Writings and Dreams

Miss Walker has written four full-length novel manuscripts, a three-act play, and seventeen non-fiction books, including a 14-volume transcription of her 28-year diary. Currently, her three-book novel, Amazed by Her Grace, and one of her non-fiction books, What You Didn’t Learn in Trucking School: The Trucker’s Little Book of Etiquette, are available to the public.

Social taboos, the power of religion, class differences among African Americans, and the complex nature of female thinking are the themes that drive her fiction.

Miss Walker’s favorite author is Gloria Naylor, whom she once interviewed; her favorite novels are Naylor’s Mama Day and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. She has long respected Alice Walker, a native of Eatonton, Georgia, and credits Miss Walker’s womanist writings with changing Janet’s thinking and life thirty years ago. Still, she likes to playfully boast that Alice Walker “isn’t the only writing Walker of Georgia.”

Miss Walker’s ultimate dream is to walk into a college library and find her Grace novel not only wedged between the novels of Alice and Margaret Walker but also held in similar high regard. She currently resides in a suburb of Atlanta.

AUTHOR BIO

TEXAS TOMBOY, GEORGIA PEACH

College and Real Life

Writings and Dreams

This website uses cookies.