The Judy Grahn Reader

Compiled in one book for the first time, featuring both new and out of print pieces, the contents of The Judy Grahn Reader span four decades of work by the prominent writer and activist. This volume contains writing from every phase of Judy Grahn’s career, including poems from all of her major poetry collections, such as “The Common Woman,” “A Woman is Talking to Death,” and the previously unpublished “Mental”; a number of her groundbreaking essays (“Writing from a House of Women” and the newly revised “Ground Zero: The Rise of Lesbian Feminism,” among others); as well as selected fiction and the full-length play The Queen of Swords. As Judy Grahn’s writing continues to be relevant in today’s social, political and cultural climate, this comprehensive volume gathers the varying strands of her writing and makes visible the tremendous scope of her ongoing contribution as a feminist thinker, activist, and literary artist.

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 Silliman