Born in Birmingham, Alabama. in 1915, Margaret Walker was the daughter of a Methodist minister and a music teacher, She was encouraged to read poetry and philosophy at an early age. Walker attended New Orleans University for two years until Langston Hughes recognized her talent as a poet and urged her to seek training in the North, She transferred to Northwestern University and received her BA in English at nineteen. In 1937 her poem For My People was published in Poetry magazine, while she worked with the Federal Writers Project under President Roosevelt’s WPA. There she met and befriended the author Richard Wright, often helping him revise and edit texts. Walker’s involvement with the WPA gave her a firsthand glimpse of the struggles of inner-city blacks in Chicago. She returned to school in 1939, participating in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Iowa, where she earned her Masters degree in 1940 and her PhD in 1941. Walker was a professor at Jackson State College for 30 years. During that time, she published her first volume of poems, For My People. In 1966 Walker published Jubilee, a neoslave narrative based on the memories of her maternal grandmother.