the bull-jean stories

by Sharon Bridgforth 

Look for bull-jean & dey/dem back from 53rd State Press!

 

na/i’s a wo’mn

what’s Lovved many wy’mns.

me/they call bull-dog-jean        i say

that’s cause i works lik somekinda old dog trying to git a bone or two

they say it’s cause i be sniffing after wy’mns

down-low/begging and thangs

whatever.

 

Using traditional storytelling and nontraditional verse to chronicle the course of love returning in the lifetimes of one woman-loving-woman named bull-dog-jean, the bull-jean stories give cultural documentation and social commentary on African-American herstory and survival. Set in the rural South of the 1920s, the bull-jean stories herald the spirit of African-American people.

“for my daughter/myself and all my mothers           
i need a witness that we were here and our Lives mattered...”  

— sharon bridgforth

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

 

Sharon Bridgforth

Sharon Bridgforth is the RedBone Press author of love conjure/blues and the Lambda Literary Award-winning the bull-jean stories. A resident playwright at New Dramatists since 2009, Bridgforth is a 2016 Doris Duke Artist. She collaborates with actors, dancers, singers and audiences live during performance as she composes moving soundscapes of her jazz/ritual texts. Her performance script delta dandi is published in solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews and essays (eds. E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón Rivera-Servera, Northwestern University Press, 2014). Bridgforth, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones and Lisa L. Moore are co-editors of Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project (University of Texas Press). Bridgforth is one of the subjects in Dr. Matt Richardson’s The Queer Limit of Black Memory: Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution (The Ohio State University Press); Francesca Royster’s “Queering the Jazz Aesthetic: An Interview with Sharon Bridgforth and Omi Osun Joni Jones in Journal of Popular Music Studies (vol. 25, no. 4, December 2013); and Omi Osun Joni L. Jones’s Theatrical Jazz: Performance, Àṣẹ, and the Power of the Present Moment (The Ohio State Press, 2015). Recipient of the MAP Fund and the National Performance Network Creation Fund, Bridgforth is a 2016 Creative Capital awardee for her project dat Black Mermaid Man Lady.

 

“A Revolution of Spirit” by Abe Louse Young

[Photo © 2011 by Vanessa Vargas.]

 

108 pp.

© 1998 by sharon bridgforth
Cover art, design copyright © 1998 by Juarez Hawkins

ISBN-10: 0-9656659-1-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-9656659-1-9


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