Besmilr Brigham papers

Besmilr Brigham was an American poet and author. She was born Bess Miller Moore in Pace, Mississippi on September 28, 1913 and raised in the Rio Grande Valley region in Texas, later adopting the phonetic spelling of her name: “Besmilr.” Her maternal grandfather was a member of the Choctaw Nation. She graduated from the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton, Texas, and studied writing at The New School in New York City.

While Brigham was a prolific writer throughout her career, she was most active in the late 1960s and 1970s, publishing her work under the all-lowercase name “besmilr brigham.” During this period, she published two books of poetry, Agony Dance: death of the (Dancing dolls (1969) and Heaved from the Earth (1972). Her work was collected posthumously in Run through Rock: Selected Short Poems of Besmilr Brigham (2000), edited by poet C. D. Wright. She first began publishing her work in 1966 with the submission of the long poem Yaqui Deer to Mexican bilingual quarterly El Corno Emplumado. Her later poems were published in anthologies such as 31 New American Poets (1969) and Rising Tides: 20th Century American Women Poets (1973), and periodicals including The Atlantic, Harper’s Bazaar, and The New York Times, as well as Thomas Merton’s literary magazine Monks Pond. Her work was recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts Discovery Award grant in 1970. Brigham also wrote short stories; “The Lottery Drawing” was featured in The Southern Review (1982) and Mississippi Writers: Reflections of Childhood and Youth (1985).

Brigham married newspaperman Roy Brigham, with whom she had one daughter, Heloise. From 1950 to the mid-1970s, the family traveled frequently throughout Mexico and Central America, Canada, and Alaska. She lived much of her later life in Arkansas. She died in Las Cruces, New Mexico on September 30, 2000.