Margaret Walker was an American poet and writer. She was part of the African-American literary movement in Chicago, known as the Chicago Black Renaissance. Her notable works include For My People (1942) which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, and the novel Jubilee (1966), set in the South during the American Civil War.

The Chicago Black Renaissance was a creative movement that blossomed out of the Chicago Black Belt on the city's South Side and spanned the 1930s and 1940s before a transformation in art and culture took place in the mid-1950s through the turn of the century. The movement included such famous African-American writers as Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Arna Bontemps, and Lorraine Hansberry, as well as musicians Thomas A. Dorsey, Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines and Mahalia Jackson and artists William Edouard Scott, Elizabeth Catlett, Katherine Dunham, Charles Wilbert White, Margaret Burroughs, Charles C. Dawson, Archibald John Motley, Jr., Walter Sanford, and Eldzier Cortor. During the Great Migration, which brought tens of thousands of African-Americans to Chicago's South Side, African-American writers, artists, and community leaders began promoting racial pride and a new black consciousness, similar to that of the Harlem Renaissance. Unlike the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicago Black Renaissance did not receive the same amount of publicity on a national scale. Among the reasons for this are that the Chicago group participants presented no singularly prominent "face", wealthy patrons were less involved, and New York City—home of Harlem—was the higher profile national publishing center.