The Cushion in the Road ALICE WALKER, THE NEW PRESS, $22.99 | The World Will Follow Joy, ALICE WALKER, THE NEW PRESS, $18.99

Powerful polemicist: Alice Walker challenges readers to end literary segregation. Photo: Jade Wittmann

The one thing I hope to avoid when writing about Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker and her two new books is categorising her as a ''black writer'' or even as a ''black feminist writer''. Being black, and a radicalised and radicalising peace-making woman, is central to Walker's consciousness and subject matter. She has for more than 40 years articulated through her fiction, poetry and essays the many experiences she understands from that illuminating perspective. But in a culture as lazily stereotyping as our own, especially when it comes to race, it would be a grave disservice to put Walker on a specialist shelf as though being a ''black writer'' was in some essential way different from being a ''white writer''.

In an essay written in 2010 and reprinted in her new collection, The Cushion in the Road, Walker reports that while searching for audiobooks she discovered, that on Kindle and Amazon websites, ''books by black authors [but not by authors from Iran, Japan, Ireland, England, India, China, Israel, Korea, Tibet, etc] are segregated by race''. She continues: ''Recalling the child I was, who was not allowed into the public library of Eatonton, Georgia, I think of children, especially, who will receive a subliminal message that somehow literature by African Americans isn't really Literature. That it is a separate and smaller, i.e. lesser, creation.''

In the same essay, Loving Audiobooks But Not Segregation, just one of many soul-stirrers in this richly provocative book, Walker challenges us: ''The responsibility for changing literary segregation rests with readers. Would you drink from a segregated water source? Eat in a segregated restaurant? Buy a dress where I could not try one on? Buy a book where black writers are discriminated against?''

The Cushion in the Road, by Alice Walker.

Race, she repeatedly shows, trumps gender as an issue in politics, also. ''It's hard,'' Walker writes in the earliest of her essays on the complex ''making'' of President Obama, ''to relate what it feels like to see Mrs Clinton (I wish she felt self-assured enough to use her own name) referred to as a woman while Barack Obama [then a candidate and Clinton's rival] is always referred to as a black man.''

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Walker is a powerful polemicist. This is not least because she uses here, as elsewhere, a poet's privileges of insight and originality. In Coming to See You Since I Was Five Years Old, first given as what must have been a sensational Steve Biko Memorial Lecture in Cape Town in 2010, she tells us, ''I am re-embracing poetry as a priority Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness. And it is the raising of consciousness that is the most effective way to ensure lasting change Once our consciousness changes, so does our existence.''

Walker's fame, though, and her immense freedom of voice, come from her fiction, especially from her 1982 mega-selling novel, The Color Purple, later made into a film by Steven Spielberg. At the time Walker wrote the book, the literary segregation of which she writes was thriving. Taken as self-evident, it was almost impossible to challenge.

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