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Introduction

By Taylor Marie Doherty Julie R. Enszer Laura Alexandra Harris Silas Margaret Heying Amanda Mixon
From the Fall 2026 Issue

 

Overhead the gulls cry How? How? and, yes,
I know it’s me making meaning in their voice.

           —Minnie Bruce Pratt, “The Gulls’ Cry,” Magnified 

 

INTRODUCTION

Minnie Bruce Pratt’s death on July 2, 2023, after a short illness shocked us; and, as Minnie Bruce would have wanted, it inspired us to action: writing, organizing, documenting her work and its effects on us as poets, scholars, readers, feminists, lesbians. Collectively, from the shocked how? after her death, we wanted to make meaning from her voice. In a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies, we curated a series of articles, interviews, and reflections on Minnie Bruce Pratt’s life and work. That issue is an important contribution to her legacy, but at the heart of everything for Minnie Bruce were poems. Poetry was the way that she entered and occupied the world.

Minnie Bruce was an exemplary poet and poet citizen. During her lifetime she published six collections of poetry, We Say We Love Each Other (1985), Crime Against Nature (1989), Walking Back Up Depot Street (1999), The Dirt She Ate (2003), Inside the Money Machine (2011), and Magnified (2021), and two chapbooks, The Sound of One Fork (1981) and The Money Machine (2003). In addition, she published three influential prose collections, Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism with Elly Bulkin and Barbara Smith (1984), Rebellion (1992), and S/HE (1995). Pratt won many awards for her writing, including the prestigious Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, a Lillian Hellman–Dashiell Hammett award, a Lambda Literary Award for Poetry, and the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. She was generous to other writers—offering independent classes to people wanting to work with her and study poetry and craft. Pratt was a dedicated teacher, though for her entire teaching career she was a contingent faculty member, a condition that negatively impacted her, her health, and her family. She provided support and encouragement to a large circle of poets and writers and freely gave of her time as a reader, mentor, speaker, and thinker. She wrote poems that changed our perspectives on the world, and she built poetry communities.

To honor Pratt’s work as a poet, her memory, and her continuing legacy, we have assembled a folio of eight poems by eight poets across a range of generations and poetic sensibilities with creative statements about the work. All acknowledge Pratt as a source of poetic influence. Cheryl Clarke’s poem “Reeb” transports readers from New Jersey to Selma, Alabama, fifty-five years ago and offers a portrait of the racial landscape that shaped Minnie Bruce. In “Memento Mori,” Alexa Garvoille explores how objects shape experiences in the world alongside the specter of death. Nancy Kang’s “Overcome” provides a sharp portrait of Minnie Bruce as “sugar sass” and smartness with “a shiv tongue ready to swing, stab / lovingly.” A love poem, “Petals” by Kai Coggin, is rooted in the natural world like many of Minnie Bruce’s poems.

Jessica Rae Bergamino’s “Fimmene, Fimmene” takes its structure from Pratt’s “Waulking Song.” Bergamino turns to protest songs from Italy to explore the lived conditions of women working in tobacco fields. In “Bayou La Terre,” Stacey Balkun echoes Pratt’s reverence for the natural world as a political and poetic statement. Balkun’s tercets echo the three-word formations that anchor Pratt’s final collection, Magnified. Alexis Pauline Gumbs celebrates becoming in “Become, or whatever marriage is equal to is not nearly enough.” Paying homage to Pratt as well as June Jordan, Gumbs explores resistance to rhetorics of waiting and the power of becoming an obstacle to power and a force for love and action in the world. Finally, Margaret Randall’s poem “Never the Devil’s Advocate” presents the case for unyielding moral clarity in these political times. Randall shares in her reflection the common experiences that she had with Pratt. These poems collectively create space for contemplation about Pratt as a poet as well as for reflection on what types of political and intellectual work poetry does in the world.

Continuing in active dialogue with Minnie Bruce Pratt, even after her exit from this known plane, demonstrates her significance to us as readers and writers and to a range of poets working today. Poetry for Minnie Bruce offered continuously a space for politics and reconciliation. She wrote about these possibilities movingly in “Identity: Skin Blood Heart,” her essay contribution to Yours in Struggle. Minnie Bruce believed in the transformative power of people talking together as women did in early c-r (consciousness-raising) groups; she belonged to a “group of white women, Christian-raised and Jewish, who met regularly to try to grasp the impact of racism on our lives, in this town that is now our hometown, and within the communities of women here.” She wrote that in her group, “we try to help each other think of ways to change, actions to take.” Changing the world was always on the table for Pratt, and it would happen in part through poetry. Minnie Bruce believed in the reconciliations that may happen if I “continue to struggle with myself [ourselves] and the world I [we] was [were] born in.” We understand that sentiment to include us: we continue to struggle with ourselves and the world we were born in. Minnie Bruce acknowledged that these are not “easy reconciliations,” but she believed in the work to bring them into the world. Interconnection between dreaming as a site of imagining change in the world and the work of making a new world continued in Pratt’s final poetry collection, Magnified. Pratt concludes “The History of the World” with these lines:

I woke, and told you the dream, and you said, When the history of the world

is written, and you meant, By us. The woman, the ocean, you, me. That us.

Now, without Minnie Bruce, we must continue writing the history of the world for us. By us. That us.

 

Taylor Marie Doherty 
Julie R. Enszer
Laura Alexandra Harris 
Silas Margaret Heying
Amanda Mixon

 

INTRODUCTION

REEB by Cheryl Clarke

Memento Mori by Alexa Garvoille

Overcome by Nancy Kang

Petals by Kai Coggin

Fimmene, Fimmene by Jessica Rae Bergamino

Bayou La Terre by Stacey Balkun

Become, or whatever marriage is equal to is not nearly enough by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Never the Devil’s Advocate by Margaret Randall

 

 

Taylor Marie Doherty is Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Lafayette College. Their transdisciplinary research on feminist protest, trans* studies, and community archives has appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Australian Feminist Studies, and Journal of Lesbian Studies. Beyond academia Doherty is a labor organizer, translator, community archivist, herbalist, and poet from Boston, Massachusetts.

Julie R. Enszer

Julie R. Enszer is the author of six poetry collections, most recently The Lamed-Vovniks (Indolent Books, 2026). Enszer is the editor of Fire-Rimmed Eden: Selected Poems by Lynn Lonidier (Sinister Wisdom, 2023) and OutWrite: The Speeches that Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture with Elena Gross (Rutgers University Press, 2022), among other titles. A Fine Bind: A History of Lesbian-Feminist Publishing is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Enszer edits and publishes Sinister Wisdom, a multicultural lesbian literary and arts journal.

Laura Alexandra Harris is Professor of Africana Studies and English and World Literatures at the Claremont Colleges. Harris co-edited Femme: Feminists, Lesbians, and Bad Girls (Routledge, 1997) and is the author of Notes From a Welfare Queen in the Ivory Tower (Face2Face Press, 2003). Harris’s writing has appeared in Journal of Lesbian Studies, Callaloo, Radical History Review, Voices Rising: Celebrating Twenty Years of Black, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Writing, Calyx, and Transgender Studies Quarterly.

Silas Margaret Heying is an assistant professor of English at Lees-McRae College in Western North Carolina. Their fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Greensboro Review, West Branch, Autostraddle, Literary Hub, and elsewhere; their scholarly work has appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and Journal of Lesbian Studies. They also perform drag as Ponyboi, a cowpunk who don’t apologize to nobody but his mama.

Amanda Mixon is a psychotherapist and professor based in Austin, Texas. Her research has been published in Journal of Lesbian Studies and Southern Spaces and funded by the American Association of University Women, Duke University, the University of Virginia, and the University of California, Irvine.