Pat Parker: Portrait of the Month April 2013

Pat Parker, Pleasant Hills, CA, 1989

Black lesbian feminist poet and activist, Pat Parker, was born Patricia Cooks in 1944 and raised in an impoverished African American community in the Third Ward of Houston, Texas. At seventeen, she left home and moved to Los Angeles, California, earning a bachelor’s degree at Los Angeles City College and then a graduate degree at San Francisco State College.

In 1962, she wed playwright Ed Bullins but divorced him after four years, accusing him of physical violence. Her second marriage to Bay area writer Robert F. Parker in 1966 also ended in divorce. In the late 1960s, Parker began identifying herself as a lesbian and told Anita Cornwell in a 1975 interview that “after my first relationship with a woman, I knew where I was going.”

Parker’s debut as a poet came in 1963 when she gave her first public reading in Oakland. In 1968, she began giving regular readings to women’s groups at bookstores, coffee- houses, and feminist events. Since then, she has been identified for her role in furthering the traditions of both black and feminist radical poetry. She was involved in the Black Panther Movement in the 1970s and toured in 1979 with Varied Voices of Black Women, a group of women poets and musicians. Parker’s autobiographical poem, “Womanslaughter” (1978), was inspired by her sister’s murder and Parker’s efforts to bring the killer (her sister’s husband) to justice. She founded the Black Women’s Revolutionary Council in 1980 and helped form the Women’s Press Collective. Her poems were published in the volumes Child of Myself (1972), Pit Stop (1973), Movement in Black (1978), and Jonestown and Other Madness (1989). This photograph was taken the year that Parker died of breast cancer at age 45.