AUTHOR BIO

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. She has been a struggling single welfare mother and a privileged daughterly figure living in the midst of Black Atlanta's Southwest Fulton County affluence. She has swapped complaints and shared labor with gritty truck drivers in blizzards and served as a driver and personal assistant forced to wear pearls and patience at high-end sorority functions. 

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.