Judy Grahn



Judy Rae Grahn (born July 28, 1940, in Chicago, Illinois, United States) is an American poet. Grahn's work focuses on the feminist and lesbian experiences.

Life
Judy Rae Grahn was born in 1940 in Chicago, Illinois. Her father was a cook and her father was a photographer's assistant. Grahn described her childhood as taking place in "an economically poor and spiritually depressed late 1950s New Mexico desert town near the hellish border of West Texas." At eighteen she eloped with a student at a nearby college named Yvonne. Grahan credits Yvonne with opening her eyes to gay culture. Soon thereafter she would join the United States Air Force. At twenty-one she was discharged (in a "less than honorable," manner, she stated) for being a lesbian. Grahn would move to the west coast where she would become active in the feminist poetry movement of the 1970s. She earned her PhD from the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Today, Grahn lives in California and teaches at the California Institute for Integral Studies, the New College of California, and the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology.

Career
In 1969, Grahn co-founded the Women's Press Collective the San Francisco Bay Area. She also was a founding member of the West Coast New Lesbian Feminist Movement.

Grahn's poetry is at times free verse, covering mainly feminist and lesbian subjects and themes. She uses plain language and what the Poetry Foundation describes as an "etymological curiosity that often eschews metaphor in favor of incantation." Grahn does not limit her work to just written poetry, but also collaborates with other artists such as singer-songwriter Anne Carol Mitchell and dancer and choreographer Anne Blethenthal.

Today, Grahn co-edits the online journal Metaformia, a journal about menstruation and women's culture.

Her first poetry collection, Edward the Dyke and Other Poems was released in 1971, and was combined with She Who (1972) and A Woman is Talking to Death (1974) in a poetry collection titled ''The Words of a Common Woman," in 1978.

Recognition
A collection of selected and newer poems, love belongs to those who do the feeling (2008) won the 2009 Lambda Literary Award for lesbian poetry. Grahn has been the recipient of other awards for her work. She has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, an American Book Review award, an American Book Award, an American Library Award, and a Founding Foremothers of Women’s Spirituality Award.

In 1997, Triangle Publishers began awarding the Grahn Lifetime Achievement Award in Lesbian Letters, and the annual Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award.

Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
In 1997, Publishing Triangle, an association of lesbians and gay men in publishing, established the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction to recognize the best nonfiction book of the year affecting lesbian lives.

Publications

 * Another Mother Tongue. Boston: Beacon Press (1984).
 * with Charlene Spretnak. Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World. Boston: Beacon Press (1994). ISBN 0807075051
 * with Betty De Shong Meador. Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart : Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess. Austin: University of Texas Press (2001). ISBN 0292752423
 * with Lisa Maria Hogeland. The Judy Grahn Reader. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books (2009). ISBN 187996080X
 * with Gina Covina and Laurel Galana. The Lesbian Reader. Barn Owl Books (1975). ISBN 0960962603
 * Mundane's World. Crossing Press (1988). ISBN 0895943166
 * Really Reading Gertrude Stein: A Selected Anthology With Essays by Judy Grahn. Crossing Press (1990). ISBN 0895943816

Poetry

 * Edward the Dyke and Other Poems. Women's Press Collective (1971).
 * A Woman is Talking to Death (1974)
 * She Who (1977)
 * The Queens of Wands. Crossing Press (1982). ISBN 0895940957
 * The Work of a Common Woman: Collected Poetry (1964-1977). New York: St. Martin's Press (1982). ISBN 0312889488
 * Work of a Common Woman: The Collected Poetry of Judy Grahn 1964-1977. Crossing Press (1984). ISBN 0895941554
 * The Queen of Swords (1990)
 * love belongs to those who do the feeling (2008)(Winner, Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry)

Audio

 * Recordings
 * Detroit Annie Hitchhiking (2009)
 * Lunarchy (2010)