Harryette mullen biography samples

By Ellie Rifkin and Meredith Foulke

Primary Sources:

King, Rosamond S. “‘Word Plays Well with Others:’ Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary.” Johns Hopkins University Press, pp.

King opens her review of Sleeping with the Dictionary by placing Mullen in context in the literary world; although Mullen had not published a book for six years prior to Sleeping with the Dictionary, she remained active in journal and anthology publishing. King praises Mullen for the complexity of references in the collection, describing the variety of formal techniques as “a literary circus.” The poems King writes off (going so far as to call one “forgettable”) are the more nonsensical ones, which lean too heavily on the alphabetical conceit. This isn’t a dismissal of Mullen’s formal experiments though; King later notes that “the less meaning is apparent in the poem, the more the reader is encouraged to read more for feeling than for sense” (). She concludes that Sleeping with the Dictionary is a challenging and complex construction, and recommends that readers take it in a few poems at a time rather than all at once.

Mullen, Harryette Romell. “Imagining the Unimagined Reader: Writing to the Unborn and Including the Excluded.” The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be : Essays and Interviews, edit by Mullen and Hank Lazer, University of Alabama Press, , p  ProQuest Ebook Central, ?docID=

Mullen uses her essay to explore who her writing reaches and to whom it is available. She discusses the ways in which the focus on language in her poetry can be exclusionary. Given how entrenched her work is in American English, it does not translate very well, and her insistence on playing with and manipulating the familiar in the English language—such as idioms, clichés, nursery rhymes, jingles, and dialects—also requires a certain level of cultural literacy. Though she does not spell out a critical thesis or dire

Cynthia Hogue

Department of English
Bucknell University
hogue@

Born in Alabama, Harryette Mullen grew up in Texas, the daughter of teachers and the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Baptist ministers in the still-segregated south. While completing a B.A. in English at the University of Texas at Austin, she began writing seriously, participating in the burgeoning black arts movement in the s. She received a Ph.D. from the History of Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and teaches African American literature and creative writing at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her works include four collections of poetry, most recently Muse & Drudge (Singing Horse Press, ), and a critical study, Gender, Subjectivity, and Slave Narratives (Cambridge University Press, ).

Known for her innovative, &#;mongrel&#; lyric poetry (as Mullen puts it in a interview with Calvin Bedient published in Callaloo: &#;We are all mongrels&#; []), Mullen is concerned to diversify the predominant aesthetic of &#;accessibility&#; that characterizes contemporary African American poetry and criticism. In &#;&#;Ruses of the lunatic muse&#;: Harryette Mullen and Lyric Hybridity&#; (Women&#;s Studies ), Elizabeth Frost terms Muse & Drudge a &#;poetic hybrid&#; that draws on both Stein and blues, among other influences&#;a lyric long poem exploring &#;the diverse influences and languages of a miscegenated culture&#; (). The interview that follows was conducted on May 25, in Los Angeles, where Mullen lives and I had arranged to meet her just prior to the American Literature Association Conference in San Diego.

Cynthia Hogue: I want to start with your origin tale. How did you start writing? Why?

Harryette Mullen: You could say there are several origins. There&#;s the origin of writing which for me goes far back, since I could hold a pencil. I&#;ve been wri

PERSONAL:

Born , in Florence, AL; daughter of James Otis (a social worker and administrator) and Avis Ann Mullen. Ethnicity: African American. Education: University of Texas, Austin, B.A., ; University of California—Santa Cruz, M.A., , Ph.D., Religion: Protestant. Hobbies and other interests: Yoga, tai-chi, music, art, travel, popular culture.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA

CAREER:

Poet and educator. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, professor of African-American and other ethnic literature; University of California, Los Angeles, professor of African-American literature and creative writing. Also worked in Artists-in-Schools program sponsored by Texas Commission on the Arts.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Artist grant, Texas Institute of Letters; artist grant, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico; faculty fellowship, Cornell Society for the Humanities, ; Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, ; Rockefeller fellowship, ; First Prize, Katherine Newman Award for Best Essay, MELUS, ; invited artist, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, ; finalist for National Book Award for Poetry, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Award, all , all for Sleeping with the Dictionary.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

Tree Tall Woman, Energy Earth (Galveston, TX),

Trimmings, Tender Buttons (New York, NY),

S*PeRM**K*T, Singing Horse (Philadelphia, PA),

Muse and Drudge, Singing Horse Press (Philadelphia, PA),

Blues Baby: Early Poems ("Bucknell Series in Contemporary Poetry"), Bucknell University Press (Lewisburg, PA),

Sleeping with the Dictionary, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA),

Contributor of essays to periodicals and journals, including American Book Review, Callaloo, Chain, Diacritics, Light Work Annual, Antioch Review, and MELUS. Fiction and poetry published in numerous journals, magazines, anthologi

Poet

At a Glance&#x;

Sources

Harryette Mullen is best known as a poet but has also written short stories, essays, and non-fiction prose. Mullen, who has been called the Queen of Hip Hop Hyperbole by the Hispanic writer, Sandra Cisneros, has published five volumes of poetry, and her work has been included in several anthologies. Mullen&#x;s creative use of homophones, metaphors, puns, and aphorisms, make even her short poems seem longer, almost filled with meaning and imagery. She writes from the vantage point of being African-American, female, and a feminist. Her poetic style is that of a language poet. According to Joan Houlihan, a critic for The Boston Comment,The Language Poet must construct, not just a poem, but an uber-poem, a poem that does more than &#x;mean&#x; something, a poem that eclipses westernized thought structures, transcends cultural products, and frees minds enslaved by capitalism. Radically PC (Poetically Correct), Language Poets strive to create a new world order.

Mullen was born on July 1, , in Florence, Alabama. When she was three years old her family moved to Fort Worth, Texas where they were the first black family to have moved into the neighborhood. Mullen remembers that, at the time, Texas was a segregated state and that her new neighborhood was hostile, to say the least&#x;many neighbors moved immediately after their arrival. Not only was Mullen the wrong color, she did not sound right either. As she explained to Cal-taolo, her family had come from Pennsylvania and spoke proper English as opposed to black English and were accused of sounding seddity or dicty or proper. Mullen&#x;s grandmother, on the other hand, lived in a neighborhood where many Mexican Americans lived and, as a young girl, she picked up a few phrases and practiced her Spanish with the neighbors. Later, Mullen studied Spanish in school, although she never became completely fluent.

Her f