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Minnie Bruce Pratt, a faculty member at the Union Institute, Cincinnati, has been named to hold the Jane Watson Irwin Visiting Professor of Women's Studies chair for the 2002-03 academic year at Hamilton College.

The Irwin professorship supports the needs and interests of women at Hamilton. It was established by Jane Irwin Droppa, a 1974 Kirkland College graduate, in memory of her mother, and then transferred to Hamilton College when the two colleges joined in 1978.      

Pratt comes to Hamilton from the Union Institute, Cincinnati, a non-residential alternative Ph.D.-granting university where she serves on the graduate faculty. In spring 2000 she was the New York City Writer's Community Writer-in-Residence for the YMCA National Writer's Voice Program.  She earned a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and bachelor's degree from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Pratt says she received her actual education "through grass-roots organizing with women in the army-base town of Fayetteville, NC, and through teaching at historically Black universities." Pratt's fields of specialization include feminist theory and the intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality; and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender studies.

For five years Pratt was a member of the editorial collective of Feminary: A Feminist Journal for the South, Emphasizing Lesbian Visions. She co-authored Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism, which has been adopted for classroom use in hundreds of college courses. She has published four books of poetry, The Sound of One Fork, We Say We Love Each Other, Crime Against Nature, and Walking Back Up Depot Street. 

Depot Street is both a story of the segregated rural South and the story of a white woman named Beatrice who is leaving that home for the post-industrial North. It was chosen as the Best Gay and Lesbian Book of the Year by ForeWord: Magazine of Independent Bookstores and Booksellers. The book also was awarded Honorable Mention by The Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in the U.S., Outstanding Book Awards; it was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for poems, and was a finalist in Poetry, Lambda Literary Awards.

Pratt is the recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. She has also taught at the University of Maryland-College Park, and George Washington University.

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