title: "Anything That Gets Me in My Heart": Pat Parker's Poetry of Justice.
abstract: This article argues that love and justice are interlocking themes that undergird and motivate the poetry and activism of the Black lesbian feminist Pat Parker. Parker was a prolific working-class poet, a committed Black lesbian feminist, and an international trailblazer whose poems, like her famous "Womanslaughter" discussed in this article, document the many injustices that Black women endured in an anti-Black, rabidly homophobic, and patriarchal U.S. during the last decades of the twentieth century. In a political moment where righteous cries of #BlackLivesMatter are heard across the United States I use this article to remind us all of the historical importance that Black lesbians played and continue to play in the struggles of anti-racist justice in America.
authors.affiliation: a Department of American Culture, University of Michigan , Michigan , USA.
authors.forename: David B
authors.initials: DB
authors.lastname: Green
mesh_terms: D044383:Black People / Q000266:history*; D005260:Female; D019513:Feminism / Q000266:history*; D033062:Friends; D049673:History, 20th Century; D018452:Homosexuality, Female / Q000266:history*; D006801:Humans; D011037:Poetry as Topic / Q000266:history*; D012935:Social Justice / Q000266:history*; D012938:Social Perception; D014481:United States; D001741:Black or African American
keywords: Black; Black poetry; Pat Parker; biography; feminist; justice; lesbian; love