Major Works
- Run Through Rock (posthumous publication; 2000)
- Heaved from the Earth, (1971)
- Agony Dance: Death of the Dancing Dolls (1969)
Biography
Award-winning poet and short story writer Bess Miller Moore was born in Pace, Mississippi, in 1913. Her grandfather was Choctaw. Brigham told C. C. Wright in a PBS documentary that she decided to spell her name phonetically because that was how people said her name (Bess Miller Brigham became Besmilr).
She was a graduate of Mary Hardin-Baylor College in Texas. She also studied at the New School for Social Research in New York where she met and married her husband Roy Brigham, who worked at a newspaper.
She was the winner of an NEA Fellowship in 1970 and was a student of the American poet Robert Duncan at one time. Her poems were published in many collections. Her poetry tended to be rhythmic and rather experimental. One of her short stories, The Lottery Drawing, is published in the anthology Mississippi Writers: Reflections of Childhood and Youth.
She lived much of her life in Horatio, Arkansas, with her husband and many cats, choosing to live in relative obscurity after the 1970’s. In later years, she lived with her daughter and son-in-law in New Mexico. She died in 2000.
Lost Roads press has initiated a Besmilr Brigham Women Writers Award.