Poet, author, and activist,
Minnie
Bruce Pratt delivers the first Rose Gladney Lecture "When I Say
'Steal,' Who Do You Think Of?" in her hometown of Centreville, Alabama.
Pratt holds a bachelor´s degree from the University of Alabama and
a doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 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. In 1989,
Crime
Against Nature was chosen as the Lamont Poetry Selection by the
Academy of American Poets in 1989, and won the American Library Association Gay and
Lesbian Book Award for Literature in 1991. Dr. Pratt's 1992 book of autobiographical
and political essays,
Rebellion: Essays 1980-1991, was a finalist for the
Lambda Literary Awards. Her book of prose stories about gender boundary crossing,
S/HE, was a finalist for the 1995 American Library Association Gay, Lesbian,
and Bisexual Book Award, as well as a finalist for the Firecracker Award in non-fiction.
Pratt has also received a Lillian Hellman-Dashiell
Hammett Award from the Fund for Free Expression and a Creative Writing Fellowship
in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts.
This inaugural Rose Gladney Lecture was originally presented at the University
of Alabama at Tuscaloosa on March 18, 2004. Dr. Gladney is a former University
of Alabama associate professor of American Studies who has devoted herself
to issues of social justice and change. The Rose Gladney Lecture is hosted
by the University of Alabama´s
American
Studies Department. For more information contact
Dr.
Lynne Adrian.
Also on
Southern Spaces, Pratt reads her poem "
No Place."
