Judy Grahn
Presented by the Chatham MFA program in collaboration with the Women’s Institute Distinguished Speaker Series and Carlow's Madwomen in the Attic

Foremother Dr. Judy Grahn is internationally known as a poet, writer, activist and cultural theorist. Her writings helped fuel second wave feminism, gay and lesbian activism, and women’s spirituality movements beginning in 1965. Her memoir, A Simple Revolution: the Making of an Activist Poet, recounts her co-founding of the Gay Women’s Liberation movement and the Women’s Press Collective in 1969. The Judy Grahn Reader serves as a primer for classrooms and researchers.

Her poetry collections include A Woman Is Talking To Death (considered by many to be her masterpiece), The Queen of Wands, The Queen of Swords, She Who and The Common Woman Poems, which were foundational to the development of cultural feminism.

Her non-fiction work includes the best seller Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds in which she offered the first published gay cultural research which also became an early book in the canon of creative non-fiction. In 1982 she began working on a theory of positive menstruation and women’s contributions to culture and filled the original ideas out with a new origin story in Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World published in 1993.

Recent publications include the 2016 selections of her writing on metaformic philosophy in the series Lost & Found at CUNY. And a poetry publication in 2017, Hanging On Our Bones, described as “Contemporary Lamentations in Nine Parts.”

Grahn has held academic positions at Stanford University, New College of California, California Institute of Integral Studies, Sofia University, and the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. She has given more than 1,000 readings, lectures and presentations in all kinds of venues, including many U.S. universities. Her work has been used all over the world in different communities to create plays, musicals, films, books, original research and healing.

Location

Welker Room, Laughlin Music Hall

Contact Information

Melody Harris
(412) 365-1578
m.harris@chatham.edu

Event Sponsors/Partners: