Citizenship American Years active 1975-present | Name Minnie Pratt Role Educator | |
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Subject race, class, gender and sexual theory Children Ransom WeaverBen Weaver Awards James Laughlin Award Books Crime Against Nature, S/He, The Dirt She Ate: Selected, Walking Back Up Depot Str, We say we love each other Similar Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Leslie Feinberg, Alison Bechdel | ||
2012 festival minnie bruce pratt burning water
Minnie Bruce Pratt (born September 12, 1946 in Selma, Alabama) is an American educator, activist and essayist. She is a Professor of Writing and Women’s Studies at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York where she was invited to help develop the university’s first Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender Study Program.
Contents
- 2012 festival minnie bruce pratt burning water
- Minnie Bruce Pratt
- Early life and education
- Career
- Social activism
- Personal life
- Published works
- Honors and awards
- References
Minnie Bruce Pratt
Early life and education
Pratt was born in Selma, Alabama, and grew up in Centreville, Alabama. She graduated with a B.A. from the University of Alabama (1968) and earned a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of North Carolina (1979).
Career
She has written extensively about race, class, gender and sexual theory. Pratt, along with lesbian writers Chrystos and Audre Lorde, received a Hellman/Hammett grant from the Fund for Free Expression to writers "who have been victimized by political persecution." Pratt, Chrystos and Lorde were chosen because of their experience as "a target of right-wing and fundamentalist forces during the recent attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts."
Pratt is the author of Crimes Against Nature (1990), a book where she describes losing custody of her children because of her lesbianism. She is a contributing editor to Workers World newspaper.
She is on the faculty of Union Institute & University, a distance education school.
Social activism
In 1977, Pratt helped found WomonWrites, a Southeastern lesbian writers conference. While attending the University of North Carolina in 1978, she joined Feminary, southern feminist writing collective based in Chapel Hill and Durham, NC. Later she became a member of LIPS, a Washington, D.C. lesbian direct action group, which participated in civil disobedience at the 1987 protest of the Bowers vs. Hardwick sodomy law decision made by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Her political affiliations include the International Action Center, the National Women's Fightback Network, and the National Writers Union.
Personal life
Pratt lives in Syracuse, New York. She is the widow of author and activist Leslie Feinberg, who died in November 2014. Feinberg and Pratt married in New York and Massachusetts in 2011.
Pratt has two sons from a prior marriage to poet Marvin E. Weaver II which ended in divorce in Fayetteville, North Carolina in 1975. She lost custody of her children because the state criminalised homosexual activity at the time.