Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} For Nights Like This One Stories of Loving Women by Becky Birtha For Nights Like This One: Stories of Loving Women by Becky Birtha. Our systems have detected unusual traffic activity from your network. Please complete this reCAPTCHA to demonstrate that it's you making the requests and not a robot. If you are having trouble seeing or completing this challenge, this page may help. If you continue to experience issues, you can contact JSTOR support. Block Reference: #47931260-ce92-11eb-83fa-61817bee886b VID: #(null) IP: 116.202.236.252 Date and time: Wed, 16 Jun 2021 11:02:02 GMT. For Nights Like This One: Stories of Loving Women by Becky Birtha. Our systems have detected unusual traffic activity from your network. Please complete this reCAPTCHA to demonstrate that it's you making the requests and not a robot. If you are having trouble seeing or completing this challenge, this page may help. If you continue to experience issues, you can contact JSTOR support. Block Reference: #47922800-ce92-11eb-a063-cb727f190c05 VID: #(null) IP: 116.202.236.252 Date and time: Wed, 16 Jun 2021 11:02:02 GMT. Becky Birtha. Becky Birtha (born October 11, 1948) is an American poet and children's author who lives in the greater Philadelphia area. She is best known for her poetry and short stories depicting African-American and lesbian relationships, often focusing on topics such as interracial relationships, emotional recovery from a breakup, single parenthood and adoption. Her poetry was featured in the acclaimed 1983 anthology of African- American feminist writing Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology , edited by Barbara Smith and published by the Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. She has won a Lambda Literary award for her poetry. She has been awarded grants from the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts to further her literary works. In recent years she has written two children's historical fiction picture books about the African-American experience. Contents. Early life. Birtha was born on October 11, 1948, in Hampton, Virginia, to Jessie Moore Birtha and Herbert Marshall Birtha. She is the younger sister of Rachel Birtha Eitches, a former international radio broadcaster for the Voice of America. She self-identifies as an African-American with Cherokee, Catawba, African, and Irish heritage, all of which inform her writing. Birtha grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She attended the State University of New York at Buffalo for a Bachelor of Science in Child Studies in 1973 and later obtained a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts in 1984. In addition to her writing, she has worked as a teacher, a legal librarian, and as a representative for an adoption agency. Career and writings. Birtha's first published book of short stories was For Nights Like This One: Stories of Loving Women (1983), an anthology of short stories about lesbian relationships. Her second book, Lovers' Choice , continues Birtha's focus upon the experience of marginalized African-American women in such stories as "Route 23: 10th and Bigler to Bethlehem Pike", in which a desperate mother takes her children on an all-night public bus ride through the city of Philadelphia in order to keep them warm. She wrote the foreword for Breaking Silence (1983) by Anne B. Keating in November 1983. Birtha and Keating were members of a local feminist writers' workshop in Philadelphia under the guise of a local chapter of the Feminist Writers Guild. In 1991, Birtha published The Forbidden Poems , an anthology of poetry focusing on lesbian relationships. According to Birtha, "Several [of the] poems were written as part of the process of recovering from the breakup of a 10-year lesbian relationship, of trying to find a way to deal with the feelings that the breakup produced in [her]". The Publishers Weekly review of The Forbidden Poems states that in her writings Birtha exhibits a "considerable ability to endow ordinary perceptions and occurrences with a profound significance" in her depictions of a lesbian community that is "stable, loving and creative--and whose members can all make a great cup of tea: 'even a hardcore stomping deisel dyke / can't ruin a pot of boiling water.'" Her works have been published in Azalea: A Magazine by Third World Lesbians , Conditions , Sinister Wisdom and Women: a Journal of Liberation . She writes book reviews for The New Women's Times Feminist Review . Ed Hermance, owner and manager of the Philadelphia gay and lesbian bookstore Giovanni's Room, has stated that Birtha's stories "have a vivid sense of place as well as an emotional depth rare among storytellers". Speaking at the 13th Annual Trenton Writers Conference in 1994, Birtha discussed her career as a writer, stating: "Have being black, a woman and lesbian been the biggest barriers I have had to overcome to become a successful writer? . No, in fact. I celebrate it. I am also an adoptive parent, a single mother and a Quaker, and that has not stopped me from writing, either." In later years, Birtha transitioned to writing primarily for children. Her first children's book Grandmama’s Pride (2005) has earned the Golden Kite book award and placement in the master reading lists of Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri and Georgia. Her second picture book Lucky Beans (2010) was named as one of the New York Public Library's 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing 2010 as well as one of Smithsonian Magazine ′s 2010 Notable Books for Children. Birtha is a member of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. Personal life. Birtha lives with her partner Nancy and daughter Tasha in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. She practiced Balkan folkdancing for over seventeen years and later studied other forms of modern and folk dance. Birtha is a member of the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society. Her current hobbies are folk dance and playing the hammered dulcimer. She is a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). In February, 1991, she gave a keynote address to the Friends for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Concerns conference in which she described writing as a meditative and healing process that connects her to her Quaker faith. Awards. In 1985, Becky Birtha received an Individual Fellowship in Literature from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She later received a Creative Writing Fellowship Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988. She won a Pushcart Prize in 1989 for her story "Jonnieruth". In 1992, she won one of the 4th Lambda Literary Awards for her anthology of lesbian poetry, The Forbidden Poems (1991). She was awarded one of the Pew Fellowships in the Arts grants for $50,000 for the year 1993. Her children's book Grandmama's Pride (2005) won the 2005 Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Golden Kite Honor Book for Picture Book Text. Her children's book Lucky Beans (2010) won the 2010 Arkansas Diamond Primary Book Award. For Nights Like This One: Stories of Loving Women by Becky Birtha. Becky Birtha was born in Hampton, Virginia, and is the namesake of her great-grandmother, who was a slave. Birtha also claims Irish, Cherokee, and Catawba roots, a heritage which manifests itself in the multicultural slant of her fiction and poetry. She spent most of her childhood in Philadelphia, and attended college at Case Western Reserve before dropping out to move to Berkeley, California. There she experienced the most intense times of the Berkeley protests and People's Park. She soon moved to New York where she graduated from SUNY Buffalo with a self-designed major in children's studies. Ms. Birtha holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Vermont College and a B.S. in children's studies from SUNY at Buffalo. Her honors include a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Individual Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship.She has published three books of poetry, including the 1991 collection The Forbidden Poems , and her work is included in several anthologies. She currently teaches at Goddard College and at Bryn Mawr College. Becky defines herself as a black lesbian feminist Quaker from a middle-class background. She grew up primarily in Philadelphia, where she produced two collections of short stories and a collection of her poetry. Her work has appeared in many anthologies. In 1985 she was awarded an Individual Fellowship in Literature from the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts, and in 1988 she received a Creative Writing Fellowship in literature from the National Endowment of the Arts. Birtha's first short fiction collection, For Nights Like This One (1983), is an insightful look at the politics of lesbian and interracial relationships. In her second collection of short fiction, Lover's Choice (1987), Birtha creates complex characters, individuals who arrive at crossroad moments which require them to make critical life-changing decisions. Many of her characters are involved in interracial relationships. Birtha courageously depicts white women through black women's eyes, writing freely from a black lesbian perspective. this to say about that. A story about an elderly, Black lesbian. One doesn’t stumble upon those too often. Though, unfortunately, the elderly lesbian isn’t living at Mertins Dyke Home. This story….is quite ordinary. And I think that might be Birtha’s intention. She depicts a rather unordinary relationship in a very ordinary way. The reader comes to find that being “in the life” is not very different from being not in the life. When Max’s partner asks her to describe what being in the life was like when homosexuality was less accepted, Jinx struggles to think of any stories to tell. She does finally think of something, but it is a rather generic account. The homosexual couple in her story could have been a heterosexual couple. Birtha’s use of a lesbian couple in which one woman is more “masculine” and the other more “feminine” accentuates this ordinariness. While the narrator did tend to wear slacks and her lover wear dresses, Birtha included less stereotypical characteristics that made the character more “masculine” than Grace, her love of watching Grace, for example.