While blessing the incoming Barack Obama administration, poet, novelist, and essayist Alice Walker criticized U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East during a Washington DC reading yesterday. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple read at a standing-room only event at the Busboys and Poets restaurant--a block-long line of fans were turned away, but peeked through the long rows of picture-windows.

Walker opened her reading by attacking "the terrorization of the planet by the U.S. and Israel." She read a poem about the death of her sister in December 2008, mixing her grief with images of children killed during bombing raids on the Gaza Strip. She closed her reading by celebrating Obama and reading an uplifting poem from her collection, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For.