Controversial Southern writer Minnie Bruce Pratt to visit KU

LAWRENCE -- A controversial poet, essayist and activist will be on the University of Kansas campus this week for a reading and roundtable discussion on art, politics and freedom of expression.

Minnie Bruce Pratt, described by the Fund for Free Expression as "a target of right-wing and fundamentalist forces," will read her work at Alderson Auditorium in the Kansas Union at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, May 1.

The reading, sponsored by the KU Department of English, is free and open to the public.

Pratt also will lead a roundtable discussion on art, politics and freedom of expression in the Governor's Room in the Kansas Union at 3:30 p.m. Friday, May 2. Those who wish to attend the discussion should contact Joe Harrington at j-harrington@ku.edu or (785) 864-2575.

In 1991, Pratt was chosen, along with lesbian writers Chrystos and Audre Lorde, to receive a Lillian Hellman-Dashiell Hammett award, for writers "who have been victimized by political persecution." Her most recent book of poetry, "Walking Back Up Depot Street," is both a story of the segregated rural South and of a white woman named Beatrice who is leaving that home for the postindustrial North. The book was named 1999's Best Lesbian/Gay Book by ForeWord: Magazine of Independent Bookstores and Booksellers. Poems from that book were nominated for the Pushcart Prize and received the Larry Levis Poetry Prize from Prairie Schooner.

Her second book of poems, "Crime Against Nature," which dealt with Pratt's relationship to her two sons as a lesbian mother, was a Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. In 1992, her book of autobiographical and political essays, "Rebellion: Essays 1980-1991," was a finalist in non-fiction for the Lambda Literary Awards.

For more information about events, contact Joe Harrington at (785) 864-2575 or j-harrington@ku.edu. For information about Pratt and her writings, visit the Academy of American Poets Web site, www.poets.org, or www.mbpratt.org.