Harryette Mullen American Poet - Assignment Example

As an emerging poet, Mullen received a literature award from the Black Arts Academy, a Dobie-Paisano writer’s fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters and University of Texas, and an artist residency from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. In Texas, she worked in the Artists in Schools program before enrolling in graduate school in California, where she continued her study of American literature and encountered even more diverse communities of writers and artists.

Her books of poetry include Muse & Drudge (Singing Horse, 1995), S*PeRM**K*T (1992), Trimmings (1991), and Tree Tall Woman (1981). Mullen was influenced by the social, political, and cultural movements of African Americans, Mexican Americans, and women in the 1960s-70s, including Civil Rights, Black Power, the Black Arts Movement, Movimiento Chicano, and feminism. Her first book, Tree Tall Woman, which showed traces of all of these influences, was published in 1981. Especially in her later books, Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, Muse & Drudge, and Sleeping with the Dictionary, Mullen frequently combines cultural critique with humor and wordplay as her poetry grapples with topics such as globalization, mass culture, consumerism, and the politics of identity.

Critics, including Elisabeth Frost and Juliana Spahr, have suggested that Mullen’s poetry audience is an eclectic community of collaborative readers who share individual and collective interpretations of poems that may provoke multiple, divergent, or contradictory meanings, according to each reader’s cultural background. Her poetry has appeared in journals and magazines including Agni Review, Antioch Review, Arras, Big Allis, Black Renaissance, Bombay Gin, Chain, Epoch, Furniture, Hambone, Hole, La Jornada Semanal, Long News in the Short Century, Parnassus, Proliferation, Prosodia, Voice Literary Supplement, and The World.