In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens

Another text assigned in Smith’s seminar on Lucille Clifton. Walker’s essay explores creativity, inheritance, and forms of knowledge that conventional cultural categories can fail to recognize. Walker considers creative expression in gardens, quilts, storytelling, and other aspects of everyday life.

The essay gives its title to Walker’s 1983 collection, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose.

Alice Walker is an American novelist, poet, and essayist whose novel The Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.