Rebecca Walker is a best-selling author, an acclaimed speaker and teacher, and an award-winning visionary and activist.
Time Magazine named Walker one of the fifty most influential American leaders of her generation because of her transformative views on race, gender, sexuality and power--an award followed by many others, including the Women Who Could Be President Award from the League of Women Voters, The Woman of Distinction Award from the American Association of University Women, 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 latest memoir, Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence was published in March 2007: "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."--Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia
Her new collection about courageous family configurations: One Big Happy Family: 18 Writers Talks About Polyamory, Open Adoption, Mixed Marriage, Househusbandry, Single Motherhood and Other Realities of Truly Modern Love, is coming from Riverhead Books in February of 2009: "A moving, wildly diverse collection showing how radically different familial configurations can work. Eye-opening and sometimes shocking, it brilliantly explodes traditional notions about the nuclear family." --Kirkus
Rebecca has spoken at hundreds of high schools and universities including Exeter, Harvard, Oberlin, Smith, MIT, and Stanford, and addressed dozens of organizations and corporations including Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, Sony Music, The National Council of Teachers of English, RuterDam Stockholm, Hewitt and 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, Fresh Air, Good Morning America, Oprah, and been profiled in the New York Times.
Rebecca's essays, articles, blog posts, and reviews appear in Real Simple, The Root, The Washington Post, BookForum, The Huffington Post, Spin, Babble, Salon, Marie Claire, Glamour, Child, Plum, CNN, Essence, Vibe, Buddhadharma, What is Enlightenment, Self, and several award-winning anthologies. She teaches the art of memoir at workshops, MFA programs, and writing conferences internationally, and is a private publishing consultant to non-fiction writers developing their work for publication.
One of the original leaders of third wave feminism, Rebecca is 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 was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and has lived in Mexico, Kenya, New York, San Francisco, Washington DC, and New Haven, Connecticut where she graduated cum laude from Yale University. She sits on the boards of the environmental organization Save the Bay, and Children As They Are, a project of GenderPac. Rebecca has studied Hinduism, and Buddhist philosophy with renowned Buddhist masters, for twenty years.
She currently lives with her family in Hawaii.
