Minnie Bruce Pratt Biography
Minnie Bruce Pratt (born September 12, 1946 in Selma, Alabama) is an American educator, activist and essayist. She is a Professor of Writing and Women’s Studies at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York where she was invited to help develop the university’s first Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender Study Program.
Early life and education
Pratt was born in Selma, Alabama, and grew up in Centreville, Alabama. She graduated with a B.A. from the University of Alabama (1968) and earned a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of North Carolina (1979).
Career
She has written extensively about race, class, gender and sexual theory. Pratt, along with lesbian writers Chrystos and Audre Lorde, received a Hellman/Hammett grant from the Fund for Free Expression to writers "who have been victimized by political persecution." Pratt, Chrystos and Lorde were chosen because of their experience as "a target of right-wing and fundamentalist forces during the recent attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts."
Pratt is the author of Crimes Against Nature (1990), a book where she describes losing custody of her children because of her lesbianism. She is a contributing editor to Workers World newspaper.
She is on the faculty of Union Institute & University, a distance education school.
The third question in Spanish class is: De donde eres tu?
She'd come for brand-new words: las flores rojas, el puente.
To have words like crema de leche on her tongue at least
for a few weeks before tasting the bitter syllables of their history.
...
Through the window screen I can see an angle of grey roof
and the silence that spreads in the branches of the pecan tree
as the sun goes down. I am waiting for a lover. I am alone
in a solitude that vibrates like the cicada in hot midmorning,
...
Through binoculars the spiral nebula was
a smudged white thumbprint on the night sky.
Stories said it was a mark left by the hand
of Night, that old she, easily weaving
...
In Hollywood, California (she'd been told) women travel
on roller skates, pull a string of children, grinning, gaudy-
eyed as merry-go-round horses, brass wheeled
under a blue canopy of sky.
...
He was her guide. He lived in hell. Every day he thought
he was dead. Years after he's died, she thinks it's him stumbling
drunk through the subway turnstile. Just the two of them
on the platform. He asks her for money, pennies for passage:
...
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