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.
Amy Lawrence Lowell was an American poet of the imagist school, which promoted a return to classical values. She posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.
Audre Lorde was an American writer, womanist, radical feminist, professor, and civil rights activist. She was a self-described "black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet," who "dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia."
Femme is a term traditionally used to describe a lesbian who exhibits a feminine identity or gender presentation. Alternate meanings of the word also exist with some non-lesbian individuals using the word, notably some gay men, bisexuals, non-binary, and transgender individuals.
Dionne Brand is a Canadian poet, novelist, essayist and documentarian. She was Toronto's third Poet Laureate from September 2009 to November 2012. She was admitted to the Order of Canada in 2017 and has won the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Trillium Prize for Literature, the Pat Lowther Award for Poetry, the Harbourfront Writers' Prize, and the Toronto Book Award.
Judy Grahn is an American poet and author.
Lesbian feminism is a cultural movement and critical perspective that encourages women to focus their efforts, attentions, relationships, and activities towards their fellow women rather than men, and often advocates lesbianism as the logical result of feminism. Lesbian feminism was most influential in the 1970s and early 1980s, primarily in North America and Western Europe, but began in the late 1960s and arose out of dissatisfaction with the New Left, the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, sexism within the gay liberation movement, and homophobia within popular women's movements at the time. Many of the supporters of Lesbianism were actually women involved in gay liberation who were tired of the sexism and centering of gay men within the community and lesbian women in the mainstream women's movement who were tired of the homophobia involved in it.
Alicia Suskin Ostriker is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry. She was called "America's most fiercely honest poet" by Progressive. Additionally, she was one of the first women poets in America to write and publish poems discussing the topic of motherhood. In 2015, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2018, she was named the New York State Poet Laureate.
June Millicent Jordan was an American poet, essayist, teacher, and activist. In her writing she explored issues of gender, race, immigration, and representation.
Cultural feminism, the view that there is a "female nature" or "female essence", attempts to revalue and redefine attributes ascribed to femaleness. It is also used to describe theories that commend innate differences between women and men. Cultural feminism diverged from radical feminism, when some radical feminists rejected the previous feminist and patriarchal notion that feminine traits are undesirable and returned to an essentialist view of gender differences in which they regard female traits as superior.
Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild. It is characterised by a sincere wonderment at the impact of natural imagery, conveyed in unadorned language. In 2007, she was declared to be the country's best-selling poet.
Mary Dorcey, an elected member of the Aosdana, is a poet, novelist, short story writer, feminist and LGBTQIA+ activist. She was a writer in residence at Trinity College Dublin 1995/2005 and the Women's Education, Research and Resource Centre of University College Dublin. She has been described as a lyric poet who celebrates the life of the emotions and senses. She speaks of her fiction work as exploring the intimate space between social structures and individual imagination. Clodagh Corcoran in The Irish Times described her novel Biography of Desire as "arguably the first truly erotic Irish novel."
"Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" is a 1980 essay by Adrienne Rich, which was also published in her 1986 book Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 as a part of the radical feminism movement of the late '60s, '70s, and '80s.
Lesbian literature is a subgenre of literature addressing lesbian themes. It includes poetry, plays, fiction addressing lesbian characters, and non-fiction about lesbian-interest topics.
Irena Klepfisz is a Jewish lesbian author, academic and activist.
Coal is a collection of poetry by Audre Lorde, published in 1976. It was Lorde's first collection to be released by a major publisher. Lorde's poetry in Coal explored themes related to the several layers of her identity as a "Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet."
Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America by Alicia Suskin Ostriker is a comprehensive review, published in 1986, of women's poetry which shaped the feminist movement after the 1960s. The critical work illustrates a struggle that women poets faced in their road to self-expression. Ostriker, who received her literary education in the 1950s and 1960s, seldom encountered women poets. Poetry was dominated by male writers and critics. Males claimed universality in the literary language, recognizing the woman writer as the "other." The gender bias is evident even in the criticism of women poets. Ostriker says that "the language used to express literary admiration in general presumes the masculinity of the author, the work, and the act of creation – but not if the author is a woman." Gender defined the criticism that a poem would receive, rather than the actual work itself. The new wave of poetry, starting in the 1960s, featured women poets who chose to "explore experiences central to their sex and to find forms and styles appropriate to their exploration." The multitude of styles and subjects that these women poets use constitutes a new movement, one that is "comparable to romanticism or modernism in our literary past."
Your Silence Will Not Protect You is a 2017 posthumous collection of essays, speeches, and poems by African American author and poet Audre Lorde. It is the first time a British publisher collected Lorde's work into one volume. The collection focuses on key themes such as: shifting language into action, silence as a form of violence, and the importance of history. Lorde describes herself as a "Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet", and addresses the difficulties in communication between Black and white women.
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.
Genre: Poetry
Genre: Poetry
