She attended the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.īruce Pratt’s books of poetry include The Dirt She Ate: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Poetry Walking Back Up Depot Street (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), which was named book of the year by ForeWord magazine in the Gay/Lesbian category and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry Crime Against Nature (Firebrand Books, 1990), which was chosen as the Academy of American Poets’ Lamont Poetry Selection, received the American Library Association Gay and Lesbian Book Award for Literature We Say We Love Each Other (University of Michigan Press, 1985) and a chapbook, The Sound of One Fork (Night Heron Press, 1981).įor five years, Bruce Pratt was a member of the editorial collective of Feminary: A Feminist Journal for the South, Emphasizing Lesbian Visions.
Beatrice walks back into the past and finds the history of resistance that she has never been taught she listens to her fellow travelers as they all get ready to create the future.Minnie Bruce Pratt was born on September 12, 1946, in Selma, Alabama, and grew up in Centreville. We hear the testimony of freed slaves and white abolitionists speaking against Klan violence, fragments of speeches by union organizers and mill workers, and snatches of songs from those who marched on the road to Selma. In these dramatically multivocal narrative poems, we hear the words and rhythms of Bible Belt preachers, African-American blues and hillbilly gospel singers, and sharecropper country women and urban lesbians.
She struggles to free herself from the lies she was taught while growing up-and she finds the other people who are also on this journey. Beatrice searches for the truth behind the public story-the official history-of the land of her childhood. In Pratt's fourth volume of poems, Walking Back Up Depot Street, we are led by powerful images into what is both a story of the segregated rural South and the story of a white woman named Beatrice who is leaving that home for the postindustrial North. Selected as ForeWord Magazine’s 1999 Gay/Lesbian Book of the Year
0 kommentar(er)
