Description

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bull-jean & dem/dey back collects two performance/novels centering Sharon Bridgforth's southern-Black-butch-sheroe, bull-jean.

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

Twenty-two years later, bull-dog-jean returns in bull-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 from cussing 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.

About the Author

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SharonBridgforth isa 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, a2022-2023 McKnight Fellow, a New Dramatists alum, and has received support fromThe Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, Creative Capital, MAP Fund and theNational Performance Network. Widely published, her work is featured in TeachingBlack: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature and Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of BlackLesbian Thought. Sharon's Lambda LiteraryAward-winning, the bull-jean stories will be produced by Pillsbury House + Theatre inOctober/November 2022, directed by Signe Harriday. Sharon is Executive Producerand Host of the Who Yo People Is podcast series and her datBlack Mermaid Man Lady/The Show is streaming on the Twin Cities PBSplatform.