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.
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
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of Myself, Pit Stop, Womanslaughter, and Movement in Black—it also has a rich supply of prose, plays and previously unpublished poems.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
Mothers, fathers, clasp the children, tie them to your breast
and beam like flashlights, hold the children praise them with buckets
of raspberries, shiny as jelly, give them you.
Show them they are green-worthy as grass in rain, lofty as kite-flying by the Bay,
sharp as sunrise after an ice-storm. Grasp them, study their eyes, talk to them
like kittens.
Tell them they have the sturdy grace of deer, communal peace of stones, generosity
of the sea, able, able, capable and ready. Tell them they can learn to be happy
no matter what else is true. [Read more…] about Mothers, fathers, clasp the children
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