Rebecca Walker

In 2016, she was selected as one of BBC's 100 Women.

In March 2014, the film rights for her novel Adé: A Love Story (2013) were reported to have been optioned, with Madonna to serve as director.

Her first novel, Adé: A Love Story, was published in 2013. It features a biracial college student, Farida, who falls in love with Adé, a black Kenyan man. The couple's plan to marry is interrupted when Farida gets malaria and the two must struggle through a civil war in Kenya. The novel was generally well received by critics and laypeople alike.

Her 2007 memoir Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After A Lifetime of Ambivalence explores her life with a stepson and biological son against a framework of feminism. She discusses traditional pregnancy topics, such as diet and preparing for labor. She encourages young women to understand that motherhood is possible even when they have a career or if they resist it because of having had a difficult childhood. She says the book addresses the "work versus motherhood" trade-off that women of her generation and younger face after growing up in a social landscape that believes women must make a choice in order to have children. She has said she was inspired to write the book by the birth of her son, Tenzin Walker. Her rearing of him has changed some of her views on motherhood and family bonds. The book also revealed Walker's "tempestuous" relationship with her mother, Alice Walker; the two did not speak for a number of years as Rebecca was critical of how her mother viewed motherhood and treated her as a child.

At the age of 37, she became pregnant during her relationship with her partner Glen, a Buddhist teacher. They had a son together named Tenzin Walker, born in 2004.

In her memoir Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (2000), Walker explores her early years in Mississippi as the child of parents who were active in the later years of the Civil Rights Movement. She also touches on living with two parents with very active careers, which she believes led to their separation. She discusses encountering racial prejudice and the difficulties of being mixed-race in a society with rigid cultural barriers. She also discusses developing her sexuality and identity as a bisexual woman.

In the 1998 film Primary Colors, Walker played the character March. The movie is a roman à clef about Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign.

After graduating from Yale University, she and Shannon Liss (now Shannon Liss-Riordan) co-founded the Third Wave Fund, a non-profit organization aimed at encouraging young women to get involved in activism and leadership roles. The organization's initial mission, based on Walker's article, was to "fill a void in young women's leadership and to mobilize young people to become more involved socially and politically in their communities." In its first year, the organization initiated a campaign that registered more than 20,000 new voters across the United States. The organization now provides grants to individuals and projects that support young women. The fund was adapted as The Third Wave Foundation in 1997 and continues to support young activists. In the wake of the November 2016 presidential election in the United States, the organization received more than four times the normal number of requests for emergency grants.

Walker's first major work was the book To be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism (1996), which consisted of articles that she compiled and edited. The book reevaluated the feminist movement of the time. Reviewer Emilie Fale, an Assistant Professor of Communication at Ithaca College, described it: "The twenty-three contributors in To Be Real offer varied perspectives and experiences that challenge our stereotypes of feminist beliefs as they negotiate the troubled waters of gender roles, identity politics and "power feminism". As a collection of "personal testimonies", this work shows how third-wave activists use personal narratives to describe their experiences with social and gender injustice. Contributors include feminist writers such as Bell hooks and Naomi Wolf. According to Walker's website, this book has been taught in Gender Studies programs around the world.

In 1994, Time named Walker as one of the 50 future leaders of America. Her work has appeared in publications including The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Salon, Glamour, and Essence and has been featured on CNN and MTV.

When she was 15, she decided to change her surname from Leventhal to Walker, her mother's surname. After high school, she studied at Yale University, where she graduated cum laude in 1992. Walker identifies as Jewish and Black, which is also the title of her memoir, published in 2001.

Rebecca Walker (born November 17, 1969, as Rebecca Leventhal) is an American writer, feminist, and activist. Walker has been regarded as one of the prominent voices of Third Wave Feminism, and the coiner of the term "third wave", since publishing a 1992 article on feminism in Ms. magazine called "Becoming the Third Wave", in which she proclaimed: "I am the Third Wave."

Born Rebecca Leventhal in 1969 in Jackson, Mississippi, she is the daughter of Alice Walker, an African-American writer whose work includes The Color Purple, and Melvyn R. Leventhal, a Jewish American civil rights lawyer. Her parents married in New York before going to Mississippi to work in civil rights. After her parents divorced in 1976, Walker spent her childhood alternating every two years between her father's home in the largely Jewish Riverdale section of the Bronx in New York City and her mother's largely African-American environment in San Francisco. Walker attended The Urban School of San Francisco.