Susan Sherman (born July 10, 1939) is an American author, poet, playwright, and a founder of IKON Magazine. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] Sherman's poems "convey the different voices of those who have felt the pang of suffering and burning of injustice." [6]
Susan Sherman was born in Philadelphia on July 10, 1939, to a first-generation Jewish American mother and father, a Russian Jewish immigrant. [7] Sherman grew up in Los Angeles, California, and worked on her school's student newspaper in high school. [8] [9]
Sherman attended the University of California at Berkeley, majoring in philosophy and English and graduating with her BA in 1961. She began writing poetry at Berkeley, during the years of the San Francisco Renaissance, and won the university's Emily Chamberlain Cook Poetry Award in 1960. [7] [9] She also became politically active, taking part in demonstrations against the violence perpetrated on students during the House Un-American Activities police riots in San Francisco in 1960. [10] : 17–22 She also received an MA from Hunter College in New York in 1967 in philosophy.[ citation needed ]
After graduating from Berkeley, Sherman moved to New York City and became active in the theater, poetry, and activist scenes of the East Village. She was involved in the literary circles at Les Deux Magots and Le Metro Café, and helped organize readings alongside Allen Katzman, Paul Blackburn, and Carol Bergé. [11] [12] Sherman served as the poetry editor for The Nation and The Village Voice , to which she also contributed theater reviews and classified ads. [9] [13] She first met writer Grace Paley while working at The Village Voice.
She continued to write reviews for many newspapers and periodicals including The Women's Review of Books , Cineaste Magazine and The New York Times Book Review . Her poetry has been featured in The Ladder, Judson Review, Intrepid, and Wormwood Review. In 1965, she taught at the opening of the Free University of New York (renamed the Free School) and later at the Alternate U. [7] [10] : 125–126
Sherman was a founder and the editor of IKON magazine (first issue publication February, 1967), a journal devoted to the synthesis of art and political engagement, and the elimination of the authority of the critic as the arbiter of the creative process, and in the late 60s opened IKONbooks, an alternative bookstore which served as a cultural and movement center. [10] : 127–133
Starting in the early 60s, Sherman began writing plays. She has had twelve original plays produced at Hardware Poets Playhouse, La Mama ETC, Tribeca Labs, Good Shepherd Faith Presbyterian Church, and St. Clement's Space. Sections of her play "10 Lbs. of Ground" was shown on WCBS-TV, and her English adaptation from Spanish of Cuban playwright Pepe Carril's Shango de Ima, originally produced at La Mama ETC, was video-taped by Global Village for television. The Nuyorican Production won 11 AUDELCO awards in 1996. [14]
In 1967, she attended the Dialectics of Liberation conference [10] : 134–141 at the Roundhouse in London where she took part in a panel with Jerome Rothenberg and was a featured reader along with poets that included Allen Ginsburg. She traveled to Cuba in 1968 to participate in the Cultural Congress of Havana and returned there for an extended stay a year later. During the Congress she gave a paper on Radical Education, and deepened what would be a life-long friendship with another Congress participant Margaret Randall, the editor of El Corno Emplumado, whose family she had stayed with in Mexico City before embarking for Cuba.
In 1970, Sherman was one of the organizers of the Fifth Street Women's Building feminist squatters action, [15] [16] after which she became active in the feminist movement and the Gay Liberation Movement. In the early 1970s, she also traveled to Chile while Salvador Allende was in power. In 1975, she taught at the Feminist institute Sagaris, [17] and in 1984 she was invited to participate in a conference on Central America and traveled to Nicaragua with Adrienne Rich. In 1982, she revived IKON as a second series, this time as a feminist magazine which, like the first series, was dedicated to creativity and social change. After almost twenty years, she returned to Cuba in the 1990s as part of a feminist trip organized by Margaret Randall. [18] [19] [10] : 147–163
Her memoir of the Sixties, America's Child: A Woman's Journey through the Radical Sixties (Curbstone, November 2007) garnered critical acclaim from the New York Times Book Review, [13] Booklist, Publishers Weekly and Lambda Book Review and numerous authors, including Grace Paley, Claribel Alegria and Chuck Wachtel, and in 2012, her new and selected poems, The Light that Puts an End to Dreams was a finalist for the Audre Lorde Lesbian Poetry Award. [20]
From her early years in the 1980s as a part-time faculty member at The New School (Parsons School of Design and Eugene Lang College), she was active in union organizing, and has remained involved in the continuing struggle to speak to part-time faculty working conditions. Re-energized as ACT-UAW Local 7902, the union finally succeeded in their negotiations for a first contract in 2004. [21]
Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse". Rich criticized rigid forms of feminist identities, and valorized what she coined the "lesbian continuum", which is a female continuum of solidarity and creativity that impacts and fills women's lives.
Hilda Doolittle was an American modernist poet, novelist, and memoirist who wrote under the name H.D. throughout her life. Her career began in 1911 after she moved to London and co-founded the avant-garde Imagist group of poets with American expatriate poet and critic Ezra Pound. During this early period, her minimalist free verse poems depicting Classical motifs drew international attention. Eventually distancing herself from the Imagist movement, she experimented with a wider variety of forms, including fiction, memoir, and verse drama. Reflecting the trauma she experienced in London during the Blitz, H.D.'s poetic style from World War II until her death pivoted towards complex long poems on esoteric and pacifist themes.
Audre Lorde was an American writer, professor, philosopher, intersectional feminist, poet and civil rights activist. She was a self-described "Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet" who dedicated her life and talents to confronting all forms of injustice, as she believed there could be "no hierarchy of oppressions".
Judy Grahn is an American poet and author.
Amy Judith Levy was an English essayist, poet, and novelist best remembered for her literary gifts; her experience as the second Jewish woman at Cambridge University, and as the first Jewish student at Newnham College, Cambridge; her feminist positions; her friendships with others living what came later to be called a "New Woman" life, some of whom were lesbians; and her relationships with both women and men in literary and politically activist circles in London during the 1880s.
Mary Dorcey is an Irish author and poet, feminist, and LGBT+ activist. Her work is known for centring feminist and queer themes, specifically lesbian love and lesbian eroticism.
Kimiko Hahn is an American poet and distinguished professor in the MFA program of Queens College, CUNY. Her works frequently deal with the reinvention of poetic forms and the intersecting of conflicting identities.
Martha Collins is a poet, translator, and editor. She has published eleven books of poetry, including Casualty Reports, Because What Else Could I Do, Night Unto Night, Admit One: An American Scrapbook, Day Unto Day, White Papers, and Blue Front, as well as two chapbooks and four books of co-translations from the Vietnamese. She has also co-edited, with Kevin Prufer and Martin Rock, a volume of poems by Catherine Breese Davis, accompanied by essays and an interview about the poet’s life and work.
Joan Larkin is an American poet and playwright. She was active in the small press lesbian feminist publishing explosion in the 1970s, co-founding the independent publishing company Out & Out Books. She is now in her fourth decade of teaching writing. The science fiction writer Donald Moffitt was her brother.
Elana Dykewomon was an American lesbian activist, author, editor, and teacher. She was a recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction.
Irena Klepfisz is a Jewish lesbian author, academic and activist.
Robin Becker is an American poet, critic, feminist, and professor. She was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently, Tiger Heron and Domain of Perfect Affection. Her All-American Girl, won the 1996 Lambda Literary Award in Poetry. Becker earned a B.A. in 1973 and an M.A. from Boston University in 1976. She lives in Boalsburg, Pennsylvania and spends her summers in southern New Hampshire.
Doug Anderson is an American poet, fiction writer, and memoirist. His most recent book is Horse Medicine
Diana M. Vogel (1926–2013), known professionally as D. H. Melhem, was an American poet, novelist, and editor.
Becky Birtha is an American poet and children's author who lives in the greater Philadelphia area. She is best known for her poetry and short stories depicting African-American and lesbian relationships, often focusing on topics such as interracial relationships, emotional recovery from a breakup, single parenthood and adoption. Her poetry was featured in the acclaimed 1983 anthology of African-American feminist writing Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith and published by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. She has won a Lambda Literary award for her poetry. She has been awarded grants from the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts to further her literary works. In recent years she has written three children's historical fiction picture books about the African-American experience.
Heather Avis McPherson was a feminist poet, publisher and editor who played a key role in supporting women artists and writers in New Zealand. In 1976, she founded the Spiral Collective group and Spiral, a women's arts and literary journal that later published monographs. Her poetry book A Figurehead: A Face (1982) was the first book of poetry published in New Zealand by an openly lesbian woman. She published three further collections during her lifetime, and an additional two collections were published posthumously by fellow Spiral members.
Feminist poetry is inspired by, promotes, or elaborates on feminist principles and ideas. It might be written with the conscious aim of expressing feminist principles, although sometimes it is identified as feminist by critics in a later era. Some writers are thought to express feminist ideas even if the writer was not an active member of the political movement during their era. Many feminist movements, however, have embraced poetry as a vehicle for communicating with public audiences through anthologies, poetry collections, and public readings.
Maaike Meijer is a Dutch literary scholar. She is a Professor emeritus of Maastricht University.
Willyce Kim is an American writer. She is generally recognized to be the first openly-lesbian, Asian American poet to be published in the United States. Kim published her first book of poetry in 1971 and continued to publish poetry and novels throughout the 1970s and 1980s. She also contributed to a number of lesbian literary reviews throughout this time period. Her work is characterized by its celebration of lesbianism, strong women, and queer kinship.
Terri Lynn Jewell was an American author, poet and Black lesbian activist. She was the editor of The Black Woman’s Gumbo Ya-Ya, which received the New York City Library Young Persons Reading Award in 1994.
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