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. In 1969, Grahn co-founded the Women’s Press Collective of the San Francisco Bay area, and was a founding member of the West Coast New Lesbian Feminist Movement. Her free verse poetry engages feminist and queer themes with plain language and an etymological curiosity that often eschews metaphor in favor of incantation. Grahn frequently collaborates with dancer-choreographer Anne Blethenthal and with singer-songwriter Anne Carol Mitchell. Grahn’s earliest poetry collections, Edward the Dyke and Other Poems (1971), She Who (1972), and A Woman is Talking to Death (1974), were reissued as The Work of a Common Woman (1978), and her collection of selected and new poems, love belongs to those who do the feeling (2008) won the 2009 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. Her prose includes the cultural history Another Mother Tongue; Gay Words, Gay Worlds (1984); and Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World (1993). The Judy Grahn Reader (2009) includes both prose and poetry. Her most recent collection of poetry, Hanging On Our Own Bones (2017), collects seven long narratives Grahn has called “ninepart poems” into incantatory lamentations that draw on goddess mythology and social critique. Grahn’s honors include a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, an American Book Review Award, an American Book Award, an American Library Award, and a Founding Foremothers of Women’s Spirituality Award. Since 1997 Triangle Publishers, after awarding Grahn a Lifetime Achievement Award in Lesbian Letters, have issued an annual Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award. With Deborah Grenn, Grahn co-edits the online journal Metaformia: A Journal of Menstruation and Culture. Grahn lives in California, where she has taught at the California Institute of Integral Studies, the New College of California, and the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology.

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