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Minnie Bruce Pratt was
born September 12, 1946, in Selma, Alabama, in the hospital closest to her
hometown of Centreville. She graduated from Bibb County High School when it
was under segregation, and entered the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa a
year after George Wallace “stood in the schoolhouse door.” She received her
B.A there, where she was also Phi Beta Kappa. She took her Ph.D. in English
Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition
to this academic education, she received her education into the great
liberation struggles of the 20th century 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, which has been
adopted for classroom use in hundreds of college courses. In 2004 this book
was chosen as one of the 100 Best Lesbian and Gay Nonfiction Books of all
time by the Publishing Triangle.
She
has published six books of poetry, The Sound of One Fork, We Say
We Love Each Other, Crime Against Nature, Walking Back Up
Depot Street, The Money Machine, and The Dirt She Ate:
Selected and New Poems, recently issued by Pitt Poetry Series. Pratt has
also received a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the National
Endowment for the Arts, and a 2005 Fellowship in Poetry from the New Jersey
State Council on the Arts.
In
1989, Crime Against Nature, on Pratt's relationship to her two sons
as a lesbian mother, was chosen as the Lamont Poetry Selection by the
Academy of American Poets, an annual award given for the best second
full-length book of poetry by a U.S. author. The judges said of the book,
"Pratt tells a moving story of loss and recuperation, discovering linkages
between her own disenfranchisement and the condition of other minorities.
She makes it plain, in this masterful sequence of poems, that the real crime
against nature is violence and oppression." In 1991 Crime Against Nature
was chosen has a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and given
the American Library Association Gay and Lesbian Book Award for Literature.
That year Pratt was chosen, along with lesbian writers Chrystos and Audre
Lorde, to receive a 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."
In
1992 her book of autobiographical and political essays, Rebellion: Essays
1980-1991, was a Finalist in Non-Fiction for the Lambda Literary Awards.
This volume includes her feminist classic, the essay “Identity: Skin
Blood Heart.”
Her
book of prose stories about gender boundary crossing, S/HE, was one
of the five finalists in Non-Fiction for the 1995 American Library
Association Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Book Award, as well as one of the
three finalists for the Firecracker Award in Non-Fiction. In these lyrical
vignettes, Pratt writes about the many ways to be girl, boy, man, woman, and
those of us in-between. S/HE explores the inconsistencies, the
infinities, the fluidity of sex and gender.
Pratt’s fourth volume of poems, Walking Back Up Depot Street (University
of Pittsburgh Press) is a dramatically multi-vocal story of the segregated
rural South and a white woman named Beatrice who is leaving that home for
the postindustrial North. ForeWord Magazine said of these poems,
“This is an exceptional collection in every way: broad in subject, skilled
in craft, diverse in its population and conscious of the tragic world….Pratt
has created a Beatrice as momentous as Dante’s.” Poems from the collection
were nominated for the Pushcart Prize and received the 1999 Larry Levis
Poetry Prize from Prairie Schooner. Walking Back Up Depot Street
was chosen by ForeWord: the Magazine of Independent Bookstores and
Booksellers as Best Lesbian/Gay Book of the Year.
Pratt’s most recent book, The Dirt She Ate, received the 2003 Lambda
Literary Award for Poetry. This volume contains poems described by the
New York Times Book Review as “original, startling,” and by
Publishers Weekly as “hard-edged and provocative” dealing, “directly and
explicitly with issues of anger, shame, sexuality, and injustice.” Reviewer
Joy Parks in Gay Content Link says, “If you read only one book of
poetry this year, The Dirt She Ate should be it.”
Work from this
book received the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of
America.
Pratt is
currently finishing a new book of poetry, The Only Danger, from a
Muriel Rukeyser statement, “The only danger is not going far enough.” She is
also completing, with noted transnational theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty,
a volume of theoretical dialogues that will include a new edition of her
classic “Identity” essay and is tentatively titled At Home in the
Struggle.
Pratt is Professor of Women’s Studies and Writing at Syracuse University,
where she also serves as faculty for a developing
Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender Studies Program. She divides her residence
between her home in Centreville, Alabama, and her home with her partner,
transgender lesbian activist and writer Leslie Feinberg, in Jersey City, New
Jersey.
[revised 3/06]
Other Tidbits
For a bibliography of critical studies
of Pratt's work, see the entries in:
Sandra Pollack and Denise D. Knight, eds., Contemporary Lesbian Writers
of the United States: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcework.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993.
Gay and Lesbian Literature. Detroit MI: St. James Press, 1993.
Here are two photo galleries from my travels to
Taipei in 2003 and
Italy in 2004.
SELECTED CRITICAL
STUDIES ON WORK : ARTICLES AND BOOKS
Katherine Adams. “At
the Table with Arendt: Toward a Self-Interested Practice of Coalition Discourse.”
Hypatia: A Journal
of Feminist Philosophy 17.1 (2002 Winter). 1-33. (Pratt, Arendt)
Nancie E. Caraway. “The
Challenge and Theory of Feminist Identity Politics—Working on Racism.”
Frontiers12. 2
(1991). 109-29. (Pratt, Sandra Harding, Toni Morrison, Bernice Johnson
Reagon)
Wynn Cherry. “Hearing Me
into Speech: Lesbian Feminist Publishing in North Carolina.”
North Carolina Literary Review 9 (2000). 82-102.
Mary Eagleton. “Working
Across Difference: Examples from Minnie Bruce Pratt and June Jordan.”
Caught Between
Cultures: Women, Writing & Subjectivities. Ed. Elizabeth Russell.
Rodofi: Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2002.
Michaela Fay. “'Between a Rock and a Hard
Place'—On the Ontology of 'Home' and 'Belonging'”
CorpoRealities:
In(ter)ventions in an Omnipresent Subject. Eds. Body Project. Königstein:
Ulrike Helmer Verlag, 2004. 171-90. (Pratt, Leslie Feinberg)
Catherine Fox. “The
Race to Truth: Disarticulating Critical Thinking from Whiteliness.”
Critical Approaches to
Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 2.2 (2002
Spring). 197-212. (Pratt, Marilyn Frye)
Leigh Gilmore and
Marcia Aldrich. “Writing Home: 'Home' and Lesbian Representation in Minnie Bruce Pratt.”
Genre 25:1 (1992). 25-46.
Caren Jane Kaplan.
“Deterritorializations: the Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist
Discourse.”
Defining Travel. Oxford: University Press of
Mississippi, 2002. 190-99.
Laura Levitt. “Becoming
an American Jewish Feminist.”
Horizons in Feminist Theology. Eds.
Rebecca S. Chopp and Sheila Greeve Davaney. Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 1997. 154-164.
Biddy Martin and
Chandra Talpade Mohanty. “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do With It?”
Feminist Studies, Critical Studies. Ed. Teresa de Lauretis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. 191-212.
Biddy Martin. “Lesbian
Identity and Autobiographical Difference(s)”
Women,
Autobiography,
Theory: A Reader. Eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.
Tara McPherson.
Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Place and Gender in the South. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2002.
Yaakov Perry. “The
Homecoming Queen: The Reconstruction of Home in Queer Life-Narratives.”
A/B: Auto/Biography
Studies 15. 2 (2000 Winter). 193-222. (Pratt, Mark Doty, Gloria Anzaldúa)
Tamara M. Powell, “Look
What Happened Here: North Carolina’s Feminary Collective.”
North
Carolina Literary Review 9 (2000). 82-102.
Adrienne Rich. "Sliding
Stone from the Cave's Mouth."
The American Poetry Review 19.5
(Sept-Oct 1990).
“The Transgressor Mother.”
What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.
145-163.
Rebecca Walsh. “Where Metaphor Meets
Materiality: The Spatialized Subject and the Limits of Locational Feminism.”
Exclusions in Feminist Thought: Challenging the Boundaries of Womanhood.
Ed. Mary Brewer. Brighton, England: Sussex Academic Press, 2002. 182-202.
Kim Marie Whitehead. The Feminist Poetry
Movement. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996.
“Minnie Bruce Pratt: A Biographical Guide
to Alabama Literature."
Eds. Bert Hitchcock and Elaine Hughes. Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 1996.
“Walking from the Tombigbee: An
Introduction to the Poetry of Minnie Bruce Pratt.”
Southern Changes,
Autumn 1994.
Jacqueline N. Zita.
“Lesbian Body Journeys: Desire Making Difference.”
Lesbian Philosophies and Cultures.
Ed. Jeffner Allen. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.
327-345. (Pratt, Audre Lorde, Joan Nestle)
CRITICAL STUDIES ON
WORK : UNPUBLISHED DISSERTATIONS
Tonita Susan Branan.
“Issues of Where: The Activity of Place in Contemporary Southern Writing by Women.”
Michigan State
University: 2000. (Pratt, Elizabeth Spencer, Gloria Naylor)
Caren Jane Kaplan. “The Poetics of
Displacement: Exile, Immigration, and Travel in Contemporary
Autobiographical Writing.”
University of California at Santa Cruz, 1987.
Win Cherry. “’Outlaws
with Charm’: the Evolution of the Southern Lesbian Voice.”
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1999.
Jaime Grant.
“Authenticity, Creativity and Activism in the Work and Lives of Contemporary Lesbian Writer/Activists.”
The
Union Institute, 1999.
Connie D. Griffin.
“Ex-Centricities: a Geo/Graphics of Self-Re/Presentation in the Autobiographics of Dorothy Allison, Minnie
Bruce Pratt and Kim Chernin.”
University of Massachusetts, 1998.
Adrienne L. McCormick.
“Practicing Poetry, Producing Theory: Op/positional Poetics in Contemporary Multi-ethnic
American Poetries.”
University of Maryland at College Park, 1998.
Tamara Michele Powell. “Killing Scarlett
O'Hara.” Bowling Green State University, 1999.
Carlos Daniel Schroder.
“The Garden of Forking Tongues: The Politics of (Sexual Orientation in the) Translation of Poetry by
Minnie Bruce Pratt and Maria Elena Walsh.”
University of Maryland at College
Park, 1999.
Kim Marie Whitehead. “Voicing Difference:
Self-Representation and Conversation in the Women’s Poetry Movement,
1970-1999.”
(June Jordan, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Joy Harjo, Gloria Anzaldúa,
Irena Klepfisz.) Emory University, 1994.
Feminary
A direct product of the 1970s women's liberation movement, Feminary was
published by a women's collective in Durham and Chapel Hill. Started as a local
newsletter (Female Liberation Newsletter) in 1969, by the late 1970s the
publication had evolved into a quarterly "feminist journal for the
South emphasizing lesbian visions." Its content was largely literary
and the journal enjoyed regional and national readership. Members of the
editorial collective included Eleanor Holland, Helen Langa, Raymina Y.
Mays, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Mab Segrest, Cris South, and Aida Wakil. In 1985
the journal was passed on to a feminist collective on the West Coast.
http://www.lib.duke.edu/women/
See:
Wynn Cherry. “Hearing Me
into Speech: Lesbian Feminist Publishing in North Carolina,” and
Tamara M.
Powell, “Look What Happened Here: North Carolina’s Feminary
Collective,” both in North Carolina Literary Review, Number 9
(2000), 82-102.
What Does It Mean to be Queer in
the South?
(from "Queering The South," June 1997 Gathering in Atlanta, Georgia)
Queers and the civil rights movement * Is the south queer? * queer
rednecks, trailer trash, queer debutantes, queer mall rats * WHAT DOES IT
MEAN TO BE QUEER IN THE SOUTH? * carson mccullers * donald wyndam *
Flannery o'conner * tennessee williams * lillian smith * WHAT DOES IT MEAN
TO BE QUEER IN THE SOUTH? * blanche mccrary boyd * joey manley * jim
grimsley * shay youngblood * dorothy allison * minnie bruce pratt * mab
segrest * james baldwin * bayard rustin * WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE QUEER IN
THE SOUTH? * rita mae brown * bertha harris * june arnold * becky bertha *
luisah teish * bessie smith * ma rainey * michael stipe * anita bryant *
newt gingrich * bowers vs. hardwick * jethro * miss jane * elvis * jim
nabors * suzanne pharr * mandy carter * (in)visibility * alternative
spiritualities * radical fairies * southern drag * the military and
southern queers * institutional heterosexism * idgie and ruth * gospel
girls * lady chablee * ru paul * queer journalism * fighting the right *
religious right / religious wrongs * christian queers * queers and the
neo-confederacy * rural organizing * WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE QUEER IN THE
SOUTH? * outness / closets * butch / femme * southern style * s&m * the
south and AIDS
Links
The Academy of American Poets
University of Pittsburgh Press Poetry Series
 Go to travel area
 Vital
information for
organizers of any speaking engagement
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