From 1975 to 1980, she taught as an adjunct at Fayetteville State University, a historically black school. When Pratt and her husband divorced later that year, she lost custody of her children based on the state’s “crime against nature” statute criminalizing homosexual activity, an experience that she later explored in-depth in her poetry. Pratt had stopped writing after her marriage, but she returned to poetry in 1975 after she came out as a lesbian. Weaver II and later lived with him and their two sons in Fayetteville, North Carolina. During college, Pratt married fellow poet Marvin E. Pratt graduated from the University of Alabama with a bachelor of arts degree in 1968. She grew up in Centreville, Bibb County, where she attended Bibb County High School when it was still segregated. Pratt was born on September 12, 1946, in Selma, Dallas County, to Virginia Brown Pratt, a social worker, and William Luther Pratt Jr., a clerk. Her work is both autobiographical, exploring her origins in the Black Belt region and her resistance to traditional roles for southern women, and political, dealing with gender and sexual identity, race discrimination, and capitalism. Minnie Bruce Pratt (1946- ), one of Alabama‘s best-known contemporary poets, is also widely recognized as an essayist, political activist, and university educator.
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