Margaret Walker’s seminal poem “For My People” is celebrated for its characterization of the Black experience in the U.S. “Everybody knows that poem, but not enough people know who she was,” said Maryemma Graham, a distinguished professor of English at the University of Kansas and founding director of the History of Black Writing project, who spent time working with Walker before she died in 1998.

After conducting exhaustive research into Walker’s writing life and her struggles for her voice to be heard, and after interviewing her family, friends, and colleagues, Graham set out to reintroduce Walker to the world in the authorized biography The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker. Released in December by Oxford University Press, the project was 20 years in the making. But, Graham said, like Walker she struggled with publishers to give the work the attention it deserves. “Mostly people knew her as an institution builder,” Graham explained, but Walker’s work changed what it means to be a Black writer.

Born in Birmingham, Ala., in 1915, Walker founded the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People (now the Margaret Walker Center) in 1968 to preserve, interpret, and disseminate information on African American history and culture. Two years before, her first and only novel, Jubilee, set the tone for historical fiction telling stories from the South’s Reconstruction period. She published several collections of poetry in the 1970s, but in response to her sharp essays critiquing political talking points and figures such as Clarence Thomas, the public began to mischaracterize her as “an angry Black woman,” Graham explained.

“She understood this,” Graham said. “And it’s interesting, because despite the fact that she had embraced so many writers, helped to nurture writers, gave send-offs to writers, and had events to launch people’s careers—even though she had done that, especially for women writers, very few came to her rescue when she was being given all this bad press.”

After Walker sued Roots author Alex Haley for plagiarizing Jubilee, the suit was dismissed and her reputation took another hit—she was seen as jealous of Haley’s success. But nothing could be further from the truth, Graham said, as Walker was known to serve as a connector in the Black literary community. “She knew everybody who was anybody between 1930 until the end of the 20th century,” Graham added. “She might have had fights with them, but she knew them.”

Graham met Walker in the 1990s during the author’s stint as a visiting professor at Northwestern University. “She asked me the kind of questions I was accustomed to answering when I meet people in the South,” said Graham, who, like Walker, is a Southerner. In exchange for ushering Graham into the Black literary community, Walker recruited Graham to compile Walker’s collected works and tell the story of the Black South’s resistance to Jim Crow racism through her story.

The result is an autobiography that is guided by Walker’s prolific journal entries and honed by Graham’s research and explanatory notes. “Toward the end of her life, she was trying to do her autobiography, and she had said to me, ‘I think you’re going to have to tell my story because I am not going to be able to finish it,’ ” Graham said. “She left all of her journals. I had the perfect archive and all I had to do was follow her lead.”