Rebecca Walker
Biography of Rebecca Walker
'One Big Happy Family'
Time Magazine named Rebecca Walker one of the fifty most influential American leaders under forty because of her transformative views on race, gender, sexuality and power-an award which has been followed by many others, including the Women Who Could Be President Award from the League of Women Voters and an Honorary Doctorate from the North Carolina School of the Arts.
Rebecca is the author of the original Third Wave primer To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism, in print for more than ten years and taught in Gender Studies programs around the world; the bestselling post-civil rights memoir Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, winner of the Alex Award from the American Library Association; and What Makes a Man: 22 Writers Imagine The Future, about which Booklist wrote: "Walker has done society at large a great service by bringing forth these voices, these views."
Rebecca's memoir, Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence, was published in March 2007 to acclaim in the New York Times, People Magazine, the Washington Post, Babble, and on the KTLA Morning Show, NPR, and many more. Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia and Symptomatic writes, "In Baby Love, Rebecca Walker has shone a bright light on the Ambivalent Generation. Moving, wise, and deeply honest, Baby Love has illuminated a crucial question for our times."
Her latest collection, 'One Big Happy Family', explores the explosion of non-traditional family configurations in the US, and includes perspectives on polyamory, transracial adoption, househusbandry, and single motherhood.
Rebecca has spoken at hundreds of high schools and universities including Exeter, Head Royce, Harvard, Oberlin, Smith, MIT, Xavier, and Stanford, and addressed dozens of organizations and corporations including The National Council of Teachers of English, the Walker Arts Center, Tulisoma, RuterDam Stockholm, Hewitt Associates, and the Ministries of Culture and Gender of Estonia, at the first-ever Conference on Masculinity in the Baltics. She has been featured on Charlie Rose, Good Morning America, and Oprah.
Rebecca teaches the art of memoir at workshops, MFA programs, and writing conferences internationally, and is a private publishing consultant to writers of both fiction and non-fiction developing their work for publication. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, BookForum, The Huffington Post, Spin, Babble, Salon, Marie Claire, Glamour, Child, Plum, Essence, Vibe, and Buddhadharma, and several award-winning anthologies.
Rebecca may be best known for her role as the original leader and founder of Third Wave Feminism, the movement, and the co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation, a non-profit that works through grant-making, leadership development, and philanthropic advocacy to support young women ages 15 to 30 working towards gender, racial, economic, and social justice.
Rebecca is the daughter of Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Alice Walker and esteemed civil rights attorney Mel Leventhal.
Topics
- Create a space for others to safely challenge and evolve their ideas about themselves and the turbulent world in which we live
- Navigating multiple identities
- The changing face of feminism
Photos of Rebecca Walker
Books of Rebecca Walker
-
Title:One Big Happy FamilySubtitle:18 Writers Talk about Open Adoption, Mixed Marriage, Polyamory, Househusbandry, Single Motherhood, and Other RealitiesAuthor:Rebecca WalkerPublisher:Riverhead BooksBook:Paperback, 288 pagesISBN:978-15-944-8437-7Order this book? Click here!These plainspoken, cage-rattling essays, collected by Walker, address how dramatically the traditional nuclear American family has changed. Jenny Block's And Then We Were Poly sets the decidedly unconventional tone by insisting that her and her husband's embrace of other sexual partners allows them a more joyful, fulfilling commitment to each other. A gay couple adopts the child of a self-destructive street girl in Dan Savage's DJ's Homeless Mommy, then tries to keep the mother in touch with her son. In Sharing Madison, Dawn Friedman, another parent of an adoptee, writes of her agonizing process of overcoming the guilt she feels in having taken baby Madison away from her teenage mother. Antonio Caya, in Daddy Donoring, recounts his rational decision to sire his friend's child, firmly remaining a donor, not a daddy, so as not to muddle the issue. Children of mixed race force a much-needed altering of people's perceptions, as ZZ Packer explores in The Look, while Susan McKinney de Ortega's choice to marry a much younger Mexican man and make a home in Mexico challenges the American notion of middle-class values. These fresh, diverse views represent an authentic, valuable new reality.
-
Title:Baby LoveAuthor:Rebecca WalkerPublisher:Souvenir Press LtdBook:Hardcover, 224 pagesISBN:978-02-856-3820-4Order this book? Click here!The author of Black, White and Jewish gives voice to the uncertainty of her generation in a powerful new memoir. In journal format, beginning with the day her pregnancy is confirmed and ending as she and her partner bring their son home, Walker tells of her physical and emotional journey toward motherhood, poignantly reflecting on the ambivalence that has delayed her dream of having a child for years. Like many 20- and 30-somethings, she was raised to view partnership and parenthood as the least empowering choices in an infinite array of options. This tension comes to the fore as Walker's mother, Alice Walker, opposes her decision to have a baby and challenges her account of their relationship in Black, White and Jewish. Alice ends their relationship and removes Rebecca from her will, and Rebecca endures a tumultuous pregnancy, estranged from her mother as she prepares to become one herself. Elusive health complications arise, and she hops from doctor to doctor, ever wary of Western medicine. Through a lengthy litany of decisions (midwife versus M.D., stroller versus "travel system"), she Googles her way to information overload. At the end of this nine-month mental tug-of-war, she emerges changed: a meat eater, a committed partner with a renewed faith in intimacy, a new woman plus-one. Walker's story is accessible and richly textured, told with humor, wit and warmth.
-
Title:Black, White And JewishSubtitle:Autobiography of a Shifting SelfAuthor:Rebecca WalkerPublisher:Riverhead BooksBook:Paperback, 322 pagesISBN:978-15-732-2907-4Order this book? Click here!The Civil Rights movement brought author Alice Walker and lawyer Mel Leventhal together, and in 1969 their daughter, Rebecca, was born. Some saw this unusual copper-colored girl as a outrage or an oddity; others viewed her as a symbol of harmony, a triumph of love over hate. But after her parents divorced, leaving her a lonely only child ferrying between two worlds that only seemed to grow further apart, Rebecca was no longer sure what she represented – or even who she was. In this book, Rebecca Leventhal Walker attempts to define herself as a soul insteasd of a symbol – and offers a new look at the challenge of personal identity, in a story at once strikingly unique and truly universal.
References of Rebecca Walker
Publications of Rebecca Walker
Video's of' Rebecca Walker
Telephone: +31 (0) 10 - 433 33 22 or via e-mail: info@speakersacademy.eu