Judy Grahn Official Site

Poet, activist, and scholar Judy Grahn was born in Chicago and grew up in New Mexico. Grahn’s honors include a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, an American Book Review Award, an American Book Award, an American Library Award, and a Founding Foremothers of Women’s Spirituality Award. Since 1997 Triangle Publishers, after awarding Grahn a Lifetime Achievement Award in Lesbian Letters, have issued an annual Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award.

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Poet, Activist, Scholar

“In a 2009 essay for the Boston Review on the poetry of the women’s movement, Honor Moore spoke of hearing Grahn read her epic poem “A Woman Is Talking to Death” in the early 1970s: ‘With this poem the whole political enterprise of feminism was subsumed by poetic means into an understanding of the complexity of the stark power relations that involve gender, race, and sexuality.’”

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Will Rise…

Front Page Poem

the common woman is as common

as good bread

as common as when you couldn’t go on

but did.

For all the world we didnt know we held in common

all along

the common woman is as common as the best of bread

and will rise

and will become strong—I swear it to you

I swear it to you on my own head

I swear it to you on my common

woman’s

head

 

     ending lines of “VII. Vera, from my childhood”
     from The Common Woman Poems

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My Good Judy

The My Good Judy Foundation’s mission is to serve the community through literary, critical, educational and live performance programs; to support artists and academics seeking to make a contribution in the area of queer cultural studies; and to honor the work and legacy of pioneering poet/activist/thinker Judy Grahn.

My Good Judy offers a one to six week residency for artists, critical writers, poets, playwrights, thinkers, and performers. [Read More…] about My Good Judy

Book Recommendations

The Complete Works of Pat Parker, Sinister Wisdom Press, 2016.
This is the essential Parker collection. Not only does this volume contain all the poetry she published in her previous books—Child of Myself, Pit Stop, Womanslaughter, and Movement in Black—it also has a rich supply of prose, plays and previously unpublished poems. [Read More…] about Book Recommendations

In Her Own Voice

Pacific Radio Archives
FROM SACRED BLOOD TO THE CURSE AND BEYOND

Grahn reads her article "From Sacred Blood to the Curse and Beyond" published in the anthology "," edited by Charlene Spretnak (Harper and Row, 1982). Produced by Karla Tonella.

What People Say

Judy Grahn is the direct inheritor of that passion for life in the woman poet, that instinct for true power, not domination, which poets like Barrett Browning, Dickinson, H.D., were asserting in their own very different ways and voices.

ADRIENNE RICH
from On Lies, Secrets, and Silence

People always ask me about my favorite musicians but no one ever asks about my favorite poets. When I was nineteen I discovered the poetry of Judy Grahn, and I was so moved by "A Woman Is Talking to Death", it’s still one of my favorite poems ever, in the world.

ANI DIFRANCO

Judy Grahn has done more to create a women’s literature than any other writer in the past half century.

RON SILLMAN