Jackson Free Press

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A new Mississippi Writers Trail marker honors novelist and poet Margaret Walker.

It was unveiled Monday at Jackson State University, where she was an English professor from 1949 to 1979 and was also known as Margaret Walker Alexander.

In 1942, she became the first African American woman to win the Yale Prize for her poetry collection, "For My People." One of her best known novels, "Jubilee," was published in 1966 and tells of a biracial woman born into slavery in the American South.

Walker was born in 1915 in Birmingham, Alabama, and her family moved to New Orleans when she was 10. She earned degrees from Northwestern University and the University of Iowa.

Jackson State's Margaret Walker Center is dedicated to the interpretation of black culture. She died in 1998.