Remembering Minnie Bruce Pratt

This obituary was published on syracuse.com on July 2, 2023

Minnie Bruce Pratt, the celebrated poet, essayist, feminist and LGBTQ+ activist, educator, and longtime partner of trans activist Leslie Feinberg, died on Sunday, July 2nd, after a short illness.

Pratt was born September 12, 1946, in Selma, Alabama, in the hospital closest to her hometown of Centreville. She graduated from Bibb County High School when it was under segregation and entered the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa a year after George Wallace “stood in the schoolhouse door.” She received her B.A there, where she was also Phi Beta Kappa. She took her Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition to this academic education, she received her education into the great liberation struggles of the 20th century through grass-roots organizing with women in the army-base town of Fayetteville, North Carolina, and through teaching at historically Black universities.

For five years she was a member of the editorial collective of Feminary: A Feminist Journal for the South, Emphasizing Lesbian Visions. Together with Elly Bulkin and Barbara Smith, she co-authored Yours In Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives On Anti-Semitism and Racism, chosen in 2004 as one of the 100 Best Lesbian and Gay Nonfiction Books of all time by the Publishing Triangle.

She published eight books of poetry, The Sound of One Fork, We Say We Love Each Other, Crime Against Nature, Walking Back Up Depot Street, The Dirt She Ate: Selected and New Poems, Inside the Money Machine, and Magnified.

In 1989, Crime Against Nature, on Pratt’s relationship to her two sons as a lesbian mother, was chosen as the Lamont Poetry Selection by the Academy of American Poets, an annual award given for the best second full-length book of poetry by a U.S. author. The judges said of the book, “Pratt tells a moving story of loss and recuperation, discovering linkages between her own disenfranchisement and the condition of other minorities. She makes it plain, in this masterful sequence of poems, that the real crime against nature is violence and oppression.” In 1991, Crime Against Nature was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and given the American Library Association Gay and Lesbian Book Award for Literature. That year Pratt, along with lesbian writers Chrystos and Audre Lorde, received a Lillian Hellman-Dashiell Hammett award given by the Fund for Free Expression to writers “who have been victimized by political persecution.” These three writers were selected because of their experience “as a target of right-wing and fundamentalist forces during the recent attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts.”

In 1992 her book of autobiographical and political essays, Rebellion: Essays 1980-1991, was a Finalist in Non-Fiction for the Lambda Literary Awards. This volume includes her feminist classic, the essay “Identity: Skin Blood Heart,” adopted for teaching use in hundreds of college courses and community groups.

Her book of prose stories about gender-boundary-crossing, S/HE, was a finalist in Non-Fiction for the 1995 American Library Association Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Book Award. In these lyrical vignettes, Pratt writes about the many ways to be girl, boy, man, woman, and those of us in-between. S/HE explores the inconsistencies, the infinities, the fluidity of sex and gender.

Pratt’s Walking Back Up Depot Street (University of Pittsburgh Poetry Series) is a dramatically multi-vocal story of the segregated rural South and a white woman named Beatrice who is leaving that home for the postindustrial North. ForeWord: the Magazine of Independent Bookstores and Booksellers said of these poems, “This is an exceptional collection in every way: broad in subject, skilled in craft, diverse in its population and conscious of the tragic world….Pratt has created a Beatrice as momentous as Dante’s.” Walking Back Up Depot Street was chosen by ForeWord as Best Lesbian/Gay Book of the Year.

Pratt’s selected poems, The Dirt She Ate (University of Pittsburgh Poetry Series), received the 2003 Lambda Literary Award for Poetry. This volume contains poems described by the New York Times Book Review as “original, startling,” and by Publishers Weekly as “hard-edged and provocative” dealing “directly and explicitly with issues of anger, shame, sexuality, and injustice.” Reviewer Joy Parks in Gay Content Linksays, “If you read only one book of poetry this year, The Dirt She Ate should be it.” Work from this book received the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Pratt’s Inside the Money Machine (Carolina Wren Press), has been described as “stunning anti-capitalist poetics in action” and as “the voices of our selves crying out.” These fresh, gritty and passionate poems are about the people who survive and resist inside “the money machine” of 21st-century capitalism—those who’ve looked for work and not found it, who’ve held a job but wanted more out of life, who believe a better world is still possible. Inside the Money Machine was chosen for the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry in 2011.

Pratt’s most recent book, Magnified, was released by the Wesleyan Poetry Series in 2021, in the middle of the global COVID-19 pandemic. These poems are praised as “a profoundly intimate record of personal sorrow as well as ‘poetry to action’—in its resistance against empire’s economic and military destruction” and as “a fearless relation with lost beloveds that is gorgeous, queer and fiercely alive.”

Since coming into women’s liberation, and coming out as a lesbian in 1975 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Pratt was active in organizing that intersects women’s and gender issues, LGBTQ+ issues, anti-racist work, and anti-imperialist initiatives. She co-edited the anthology Feminism and War: Confronting U.S. Imperialism, with Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Robin Riley (Zed 2008). Her interview on life as an activist-writer was included in the anthology Feminist Freedom Warriors, along with those of Angela Davis, Margo Okazawa-Ray, Barbara Ransby and others (Haymarket, 2018). She was a member of the National Writers Union and worked with the International Action Center and its Women’s Fightback Network. She was a managing editor of Workers World/Mundo Obrero newspaper.

After 45 years of adjunct teaching and several stints of standing in the unemployment line, she ended her teaching life within the education system as an on-contract Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies and Writing & Rhetoric at Syracuse University, where she also served as faculty for a developing Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender Studies Program.

Pratt was predeceased by her longtime partner, the ground-breaking author of Stone Butch Blues and trans activist Leslie Feinberg, and is survived by her two sons and their partners, five grandchildren, and a chosen family of friends and loved ones.

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