Minnie Bruce Pratt's Biography

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 five books of poetry, The Sound of One Fork, We Say We Love Each Other, Crime Against Nature, Walking Back Up Depot Street, 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 has taught at the University of Maryland-College Park and recently served as the Jane Watson Irwin Chair in Women’s Studies at Hamilton College. Her areas of concentration there were Women's Studies, Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/ Transgender Studies, and Creative Writing. She lives with her partner, transgender activist and writer Leslie Feinberg, in Jersey City, New Jersey.

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