# Pat Parker Born Patricia Cooks on January 20, 1944 in Houston, Texas; died June 19, 1989 in Oakland, California. American Black lesbian-feminist poet whose work — concentrated in five published volumes between 1972 and 1989 — is one of the foundational bodies of late-20th-century American Black lesbian-feminist literature, alongside the contemporaneous work of [[Audre Lorde]] and [[Barbara Smith]]. ## Major Poetry - ***Child of Myself*** (1972) - ***Pit Stop*** (1974) - ***Womanslaughter*** (1978) — long elegy for her sister Shirley, murdered by her husband; one of Parker's most-anthologized works - ***Movement in Black*** (1978; expanded 1983, 1999, 2016) — her best-known collected-poems volume; widely used in college Black-women's-studies and lesbian-feminist literature courses - ***Jonestown and Other Madness*** (1985) A posthumous volume ***The Complete Works of Pat Parker*** (Dover Sapphic Verse, 2016) gathered her published and previously-unpublished poetry into a single comprehensive edition. ## Performance and Activism Parker performed regularly with [[Audre Lorde]] in coordinated reading tours from the late 1970s through the early 1980s — the two were close personal friends as well as collaborators. Parker's spoken-performance voice was distinctively confrontational and humorous in ways that distinguished her from Lorde's more lyrical mode. Parker was also a sustained organizer outside her literary work: - **Co-founded the Black Women's Revolutionary Council** (1980, Oakland) - **Co-founded the Women's Press Collective** (1969, Oakland) — early lesbian-feminist publishing collective - **Founded the Black Lesbian and Gay Center** (1983, Oakland) — early Black-specific LGBTQ community center - Worked as **medical coordinator at the Oakland Feminist Women's Health Center** through the 1980s ## Place in the Vault Parker is the **third major Black lesbian-feminist poet of the 1970s-1980s American Black feminist literary tradition** — alongside [[Audre Lorde]] and (within Smith's circle) Cheryl Clarke and June Jordan. Her relatively early death (45, of breast cancer) cut short what might have been a much-longer career; the relative obscurity of her work in mainstream literary memory (compared to Lorde's) is one of the canonical examples of how Black lesbian-feminist voices have been variably recovered by subsequent generations. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Audre Lorde]] - [[Barbara Smith]]