The Judy Grahn Reader
Description
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from all of her major poetry collections, such as "The Common Woman," "A Woman is Talking to Death," and the previously unpublished "Mental"; a number of her groundbreaking essays ("Writing from a House of Women" and the newly revised "Ground Zero: The Rise of Lesbian Feminism," among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
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Persons
Judy Grahn is an internationally known poet, writer, and social theorist. She serves as executive core faculty and co-director of the Women's Spirituality Program at Sofia University in Palo Alto, CA. She also teaches Creative Inquiry and Creative Writing in the Writing, Consciousness, and Creative Inquiry Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where she earned her Ph.D. in Integral Studies with an emphasis in Women's Spirituality.
Her work has won several awards, including an NEA Grant, American Book Review Award, two American Book Awards, American Library Award, Lifetime Achievement Award (in Lesbian Letters), a Founding Foremothers of Women's Spirituality Award, and an Independent Publisher Book Award. The Publishing Triangle, an association of lesbians and gay men in publishing, established an award in her name: The Judy Grahn Award, recognizing the best non-fiction book of the year that resonates themes and issues affecting lesbian lives.
Grahn's works include Edward the Dyke and Other Poems (1971), She Who (1972), and A Woman is Talking to Death (1974), love belongs to those who do the feeling (2008), Another Mother Tongue; Gay Words, Gay Worlds (1984); Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World (1993), and Hanging On Our Own Bones (2017)