'In spare and forceful language Minnie Bruce Pratt tells a moving story of loss and recuperation, discovering linkages between her own disenfranchisement and the condition of other minorities. The first title from Sapphic Classics, a co-edition between Sinister Wisdom Magazine and A Midsummer Night's Press to reprint seminal works of lesbian poetry. Beatrice walks back into the past and finds the history of resistance that she has never been taught she listens to her fellow travelers as they all get ready to create the future. We hear the testimony of freed slaves and white abolitionists speaking against Klan violence, fragments of speeches by union organizers and mill workers, and snatches of songs from those who marched on the road to Selma. In these dramatically multivocal narrative poems, we hear the words and rhythms of Bible Belt preachers, African-American blues and hillbilly gospel singers, and sharecropper country women and urban lesbians. She struggles to free herself from the lies she was taught while growing up-and she finds the other people who are also on this journey. Beatrice searches for the truth behind the public story-the official history-of the land of her childhood. In Pratt's fourth volume of poems, Walking Back Up Depot Street, we are led by powerful images into what is both a story of the segregated rural South and the story of a white woman named Beatrice who is leaving that home for the postindustrial North. Selected as ForeWord Magazine’s 1999 Gay/Lesbian Book of the Year Selected as ForeWord Magazine’s 1999 Gay/Lesbian Book.

Walking Back Up Depot Street (Pitt Poetry Series) Scholar, practitioner-in-residence The Claremont Colleges, 2007, member editorial board Stone Canoe, since 2006, Cold Mountain, since 2007, with Center Women's History Culture, Duke University, 2006. Mary's City, Maryland, 1999, National Young Men’s Christian Association Writers Voice Program, New York City, 2000. Writer-in-residence The Community Writers' Project, Syracuse, New York, 1988, The Literature Festival at St. Professor writing and women's studies Syracuse University, 2005. Jane Watson Irwin chair in women's studies Hamilton College, 2002-2003. Graduate faculty Union Institute, Cincinnati, 1990-2003. Adjunct lecturer Women's Studies Program, George Washington University, Washington, 1984-1988.Īdjunct lecturer, visiting assistant professor Women's Studies Program, University Maryland, College Park, 1984-1993.

Assistant professor Shaw University, Raleigh, North Carolina, 1980-1982. Lecturer Fayetteville (North Carolina) State University, 1975-1980.

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