A Simple Revolution Book Launch Party & Reading with Judy Grahn

To celebrate the official launch of A Simple Revolution: The Making of an Activist Poet, we invite you to join us for a night of community, refreshments, and a live reading by Judy.

A Simple Revolution: The Making of an Activist Poet is a compelling memoir about Judy Grahn’s life in the Bay Area during the lesbian movement in the 60s and 70s. The “simple” revolution she recounts involved not just the formation of new institutions (the Women’s Press Collective, Oakland Feminist Women’s Health Center, A Woman’s Place Bookstore), but the creation of whole new ways of living, including collective feminist households that cut through the political and social isolation of women. Presented in A Simple Revolution is a historical account of both the Bay Area and of the gay liberation movement never wholly told from such a perspective – that of a working class white lesbian on the front lines of social change.

Throughout, Judy describes her involvement with iconic scenes
and figures of these years—the Altamont Music Festival, the Black Panthers, the imprisoned Manson women, the Weather Underground, Inez Garcia—sometimes as witness, sometimes as participant, sometimes as instigator. Judy’s intellectual analysis of politics along with her grounding in poetics make this memoir a meaningful, thoughtful and deeply significant text.