Rebecca Walker Keynote Speaker

Rebecca Walker has catalyzed the global conversation about identity, power, and the evolution of the human family for three decades. She is the author of a dozen books including Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence, Ade: A Love Story, Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness, the interactive journal What’s Your Story: A Guide to Everyday Evolution, and her many essays have appeared in publications ranging from the New York Times and Book Forum to Corriere de la Serra and Cosmopolitan.

It was during her senior year at Yale that Rebecca began writing her memoir, Black, White & Jewish, the first of seven books on issues of race, class, gender, sexuality and power. The book was a national bestseller, the winner of the Alex Award from the American Library Association, and is now taught in high schools and universities across the world. This was followed by a book on changing masculinity, What Makes a Man, and then a second, critically acclaimed memoir, Baby Love, about the challenges of choosing motherhood within a feminist culture that prioritized less domestic pursuits.

Rebecca has written, developed, and produced film and television projects at Warner Brothers, NBC, Amazon, HBO, and Paramount, and spoken at over four hundred universities and corporate campuses internationally including Harvard, MIT, Brown, Morehouse, NYU, LACMA, The Whitney Museum, the Museum of the African Diaspora, and TEDxLund. She has served as a consultant for several Fortune 100 companies including American Express, Microsoft, and JP Morgan Chase. When she was 21, she co-founded the Third Wave Fund, an organization that gives project-sustaining grants to women and young people working for social justice.

Among other honors, Rebecca was named by Time Magazine as one of the most influential leaders of her generation, and awarded the ‘Women Who Could Be President’ Award from the League of Women Voters. Her latest collection is Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo, published by Simon and Schuster, and her most recent film production is a bold remake of the iconic book and musical, The Color Purple, which she executive produced with Oprah Winfrey, Scott Sanders, and Steven Spielberg.

Rebecca is the child civil rights attorney Mel Leventhal and Pulitzer Prize winning author Alice Walker in 1969 in the first integrated hospital in Jackson, Mississippi. Rebecca was raised under their tutelage in New York and San Francisco before moving to New Haven to attend Yale College, where she graduated summa cum laude with honors in African and African-American history. After graduation, she founded Third Wave Foundation, a non-profit designed to support young women and transgender youth working for social justice.

Walker has received many fellowships, including residencies at Dartmouth, Yaddo, MacDowell, the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, and the University of Linkoping in Sweden. She has addressed audiences on a variety of topics including intergenerational feminism, multiracial identity, contemporary shifts in the American family, the creative process, and more at over three hundred universities, writing conferences, and corporate campuses globally including Harvard, MIT, The Jaipur Literary Festival, Facebook, and JP Morgan Chase.

Walker speaks on issues of diversity, creativity, human evolution, and social change.