Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Judy Grahn
Summary
Judy Grahn (born July 28, 1940) is an American poet and author.
Inspired by her experiences of disenfranchisement as a butch lesbian, she became a feminist poet, highly-regarded in underground circles before achieving public fame. A major influence in her work is Metaformic Theory, tracing the roots of modern culture back to ancient menstrual rites, though she does not regard the philosophy as exclusively feminist. Grahn teaches women's mythology and ancient literature at the California Institute of Integral Studies and other institutions.
Judy Rae Grahn was born in 1940 in Chicago, Illinois. Her father was a cook and her mother was a photographer's assistant. Grahn described her childhood as taking place in "an economically poor and spiritually depressed late 1950s New Mexico desert town near the hellish border of West Texas."
When she was eighteen, she eloped with a student named Yvonne at a nearby college. Grahn credits Yvonne with opening her eyes to gay culture. Soon thereafter she would join the United States Air Force. At twenty-one she was discharged (in a "less than honorable," manner, she stated) for being a lesbian.
Grahn experienced a fair amount of homophobia during the odd jobs she did to earn money for school, trying to find housing, and was beat up for her butch attire. "These jolts taught me everything I would ever need to know about the oppression of Gay people," she mentioned in an interview with Tongue.
At the age of 25, Grahn suffered from Inoculation lymphoreticulosis, or Cat Scratch Fever, which led to her being in a coma. After overcoming her illness, she realized that she wanted to become a poet. This realization was partially due to the abuse and mistreatment Grahn faced for being an open lesbian. Of the incident, Grahn stated "I realized that if I was going to do what I had set out to do in my life, I would have to go all the way with it and take every single risk you could take.... I decided I would not do anything I didn't want to do that would keep me from my art.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.