Pratt, Minnie Bruce

Born in Selma, Alabama, and raised in the racially segregated South of the 1950s, Minnie Bruce Pratt is a poet, essayist, and activist perhaps best known for her autobiographical writings about feminism and sexuality. Her poetry collection Crime Against Nature, which was chosen as the Academy of American Poets' 1989 Lamont Poetry Selection, chronicles her forced separation from her sons when she came out as a lesbian after 10 years of marriage. Professor of Women's Studies, Writing and Rhetoric at Syracuse University, Pratt continues to write and teach about gender, sexuality, race, and class.

As she discusses in her collection of essays Rebellion: Essays 1980–1991, Pratt was raised to continue the traditions of the white, Southern upper-class as a descendant of a Confederate colonel. At the ...