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Anna Livia Papers
GLC 121  
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Collection Overview
 
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Description
The papers include drafts and completed writings by Livia, correspondence, reviews, interviews, notes for lectures, and subject files. Her work centers on issues of gender, sexuality and language. She was fluent in French and translated several books and poems for various publishers. Some of her own work is written in French. There are subject files on Natalie Clifford Barney and Renee Vivien.
Background
Anna Livia (1955 -2007) was a lesbian feminist writer, translator, literary critic, teacher, and linguistic theorist. She was well known for how her fiction and non-fiction explored issues of gender, sexuality and language. Born Anna Livia Julian Brawn in Dublin, she spent her early childhood in Africa and communicated in English, Bemba, Swahili, Zulu and Afrikaans. Her family moved to London when she was 15. She graduated in French and Italian from University College London. Soon thereafter she worked for Onlywomen Press, which published her first novel "Relatively Norma" (1982) and thus established her in the world of radical lesbian feminist writers. Livia is best known as a pioneering academic in queer linguistics through "Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality" (1997), co-edited with Kira Hall, and "Pronoun Envy: Literary Uses of Linguistic Gender" (2001). She also published translations of the early lesbian writers Natalie Clifford Barney and Lucie Delarue-Mardus. From 1999 until her death she was a member of staff at University of California, Berkeley.
Extent
3 cubic feet (in 3 boxes)
Restrictions
Copyright retained by the Estate of Anna Livia.
Availability
UNARRANGED COLLECTION. Open for research. Contact Hormel LGBTQIA Center archivist for more information.