bull-jean & dem/dey back

(Paperback)

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bull-jean & dem/dey backcollects two performance/novels centering Sharon Bridgforths southern-Black-butch-sheroe, bull-jean.

First published by RedBone Press in 1998, the Lambda Literary Award-winningthe bull-jean storieschronicles the course of lovve returning in the Life-times of bull-dog-jean. Set in the rural 1920s south,the bull-jean storiesis an act of griot-anthropology, remembering the ancestor we never knew but always knew we neededthe raucous, sweet-talking, heart-aching womn-lovvn-womn bull-dog-jean and the fierce and beautiful community that surrounds her.

Twenty-two years later, bull-dog-jean returns inbull-jean/we wake. Grieving the loss of their elders, seeking healing, the Narrator calls forward bull-jean. Through a series of dreams, porch prayers, and visitations fromcussing conjurers, Black Mermaids, children that fly, and shape-shifting ole folk, bull-jean and dem guide the Narrator towards a realization of the sustaining power of love, memory, community, ritual, and spiritual binding.

Reviews

"Open bull-jean gate
and conjure rises from the unbroken page into the soul
which is surely deeper than it was before."

Eisa Davis

"Sharon is solar. She has a powerful central gravity; she gives off light and gives life a faithful referenceshe writes from cause and her writing causes writing. Sharons fierce honesty liberates delight and calls up compassions responsibility. Noun by noun, diphthong and elision and swoop and nuance and sublimity at a time, she launches language that shares itself into an ambience of enlightenment. She reads us, and reading her we are brought up to our best selves. Her writing is material and complex enough to take on true love."Erik Ehn

"Sharon Bridgforths work is like breathing. It is both necessary and life-giving. I inhale the warmth and cool of her soulful southern lyricism and am able to exhale into bull-jean herself. Black/queer/masculine/butch/big-hearted/bull-dagger bull-jean. How wonderful to have this boldly crafted character guide us through the complicated terrain of love-making, love-conjuring, loves breaking, and loves lasting. And to witness her power become fully manifest in her relentless search for that romantic love. And how wonderful to have bull-jean back again, in her old age, to help guide us into healing, remembrance, and transition. Sharon Bridgforths language channels in this new story as a gift from the ancestors: Dance, music, and rituals long forgotten. Love, a measure of what we leave behind. In the end, Bridgforth challenges us to consider if weve loved radically enough to become those loving ancestors we seek."Donnetta Lavinia Grays

Author Bio

Sharon Bridgforth is a writer who creates ritual/jazz theatre. A 2022 Winner of Yale's Windham Campbell Prize in Drama, Sharon is a 2020-2023 Playwrights Center Core Member, a 2022-2023 McKnight Fellow, a New Dramatists alum, and has received support from The Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, Creative Capital, MAP Fund and the National Performance Network. Widely published, her work is featured in Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature and Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought. Sharon's Lambda Literary Award-winning, the bull-jean stories will be produced by Pillsbury House + Theatre in October/November 2022, directed by Signe Harriday. Sharon is Executive Producer and Host of the Who Yo People Is podcast series and her dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/The Show is streaming on the Twin Cities PBS platform.