ISSUE 2
December 2001


MILKWOOD REVIEW




Minnie Bruce Pratt
Poetry: "THE SEGREGATED HEART:" "First Home," "Second Home," "Third Home,"


Born in 1946 in Selma, Alabama,
MINNIE BRUCE PRATT received her academic education at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and her actual education through grass-roots organizing with women in the army-base town of Fayetteville, North Carolina, and through teaching at historically Black universities. For five years she was a member of the editorial collective of Feminary: A Feminist Journal for the South, Emphasizing Lesbian Visions. Together with Elly Bulkin and Barbara Smith, she co-authored Yours In Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives On Anti-Semitism and Racism. She has published four books of poetry, The Sound of One Fork, We Say We Love Each Other, Crime Against Nature (Firebrand Books), and Walking Back up Depot Street(U Pittsburgh Press). Crime Against Nature was chosen as the 1989 Lamont Poetry Selection (now the James Laughlin Award) by the Academy of American Poets, and given the American Library Association Gay and Lesbian Book Award for Literature. Her book of autobiographical and political essays, Rebellion: Essays 1980-1991(Firebrand Books), was a Finalist in Non-Fiction for the Lambda Literary Awards, and her 1995 volume of stories about gender boundary crossing, S/HE(Firebrand Books), was one of the five finalists for that year's American Library Association Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Book Award. Poems from Pratt's fourth volume of poems, Walking Back Up Depot Street, were nominated for the Pushcart Prize and received the 1999 Larry Levis Poetry Prize from Prairie Schooner. The book itself was chosen by ForeWord: The Magazine of Independent Bookstores and Booksellers as Best Lesbian/Gay Book of 1999. Pratt has received a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts. Along with lesbian writers Chrystos and Audre Lorde, she received the Lillian Hellman-Dashiell Hammett Award given by the Fund for Free Expression to writers "who have been victimized by political persecution." These three writers were selected because of their experience "as a target of right-wing and fundamentalist forces during the recent attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts." Pratt teaches Women's Studies, Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/ Transgender Studies, and Creative Writing as a member of the Graduate Faculty of The Union Institute, a non-residential alternative Ph. D.-granting university. In spring 2000 she was the New York City Writers' Community Writer-in-Residence for the YMCA National Writer's Voice Program.

To Visit Minnie Bruce Pratt's Home Page:
www.mbpratt.org

To order:

Walking Back Up Depot Street

Crime Against Nature

We Say We Love Each Other

Yours in Struggle

Rebellion: Essays 1980-1991

S/HE



photograph by
Marilyn Humphries



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