Liz Walker is the retired pastor of Roxbury Presbyterian Church (RPC) in Boston, and founder of Can We Talk… Community Conversations on Trauma and Healing.
Prior to joining RPC, she spent 21 years as a television journalist and was the first African American woman to anchor the six and eleven o’clock news in Boston. She came to Boston after working as a television news reporter in San Francisco, Denver, and her hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas. She has won numerous awards for her work, including two coveted Emmys, the television industry’s highest honor, and an Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Broadcasting from the New England Radio Television News Directors Association.
Reverend Walker is a 2005 graduate of Harvard Divinity School. She has also been awarded honorary degrees from numerous institutions, including University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth, Boston College, Simmons College, Salem State University, and Bridgewater State University.
She is a member of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, a multi-cultural group that works to coalesce, train and organize people across religious, racial, ethnic, class and neighborhood lines.And she helped found the Jane Doe Safety Fund, a multi-million-dollar statewide anti-violence initiative that works on policy and supports domestic abuse shelters and safe houses around the Commonwealth She is a member of the Board of Trustees at Boston Medical Center, .
She is often called on by various media outlets to comment on significant social and moral issues in New England. In April of 2013, she led the Interfaith Prayer service after the Boston Marathon Bombing. She has appeared on national media numerous times to comment on various traumatic events including the COVID-19 pandemic.
Reverend Walker is a special advisor to Women 2 Women, an international leadership network for girls, and she facilitated border crossing conversations between Muslim and Christian youth for the US State Department in Brussel in 2015 and 2016.
Her first book, Can We Talk? Vulnerability, the Inequity of Grief, and How Communities Heal, will be published by Broadleaf Books.