Craft: Minnie Bruce Pratt

Minnie Bruce Pratt (1946-2023) was one of the earliest examples of what Adrienne Rich called “the convergence of two worlds: the official poetry establishment and the feminist and lesbian poetry and publishing community, laced with activist friends.” Pratt’s Crimes Against Nature, which so impressed and influenced Rich, was published by a small lesbian-feminist press, Firebrand Books, and went on to win the Lamont Prize.

Rich compared Pratt’s eroticism and defiance to Sharon Olds as a woman poet who “refuses to hide her sexuality, abnegate her maternity, silence her hungers and angers in her poetry.” Pratt’s poetry is generous to the reader while also rupturing expectations and magnetizing her own passions as it refuses labels and categories.

Pratt in 2008: “I must do with my own, out from this almost-island of sorrow” [photo by Rachel Fus]

Pratt grew up in Alabama and was a Professor of Writing and Women's Studies at Syracuse University, where she helped develop the university's first LGBT studies program. She wrote nine books of poetry that remain innovative in their narrative style and political edge, and provide an antithesis to the paternalism of American poetry of the time.