Judy Grahn

Judy Grahn, renowned poet, activist, scholar, is the author of works that fueled both the Feminist and Lesbian-Feminist movements, in the U.S. and numerous other countries. Her mythic-history Another Mother Tongue (Beacon Press, 1984, 1991) was vital to the Gay movement during the 1980s and 1990s. Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World (Beacon Press, 1993) has been influential to scholars working on ideas of human origins. She has published more than a dozen books, more recently the autobiography A Simple Revolution: The Making of an Activist Poet (Aunt Lute, 2012), and Hanging On Our Own Bones (Arktoi Books, 2017), the latter collecting over forty years of what she calls her ‘contemporary lamentations in nine-parts,’ among these the landmark 1973 poem “A Woman is Talking to Death.” The Judy Grahn Reader, a large compendium of prose and poetry, was published by Aunt Lute in 2009. She lives in Northern California with her dyke spouse. In a 2009 essay for the Boston Review on the poetry of the women’s movement, Honor Moore spoke of hearing Grahn read her epic poem “A Woman Is Talking to Death” in the early 1970s: “With this poem the whole political enterprise of feminism was subsumed by poetic means into an understanding of the complexity of the stark power relations that involve gender, race, and sexuality.”