Source: Native American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, second edition,
BRIGHAM, BESMILR MOORE (b. 1913), the daughter of Monroe I. and Bessie
In the early 1940s they moved to New York City, where Brigham studied for
Always restless, she and Roy traveled frequently, going to Mexico, Central
Brigham's first work was published in 1965 when her poem ``Yaqui Deer'' was
Brigham is an interesting speaker whose observations and reminiscences have
In the early 1990s Roy and Besmilr moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, to be
References
Brigham, Besmilr. Agony Dance: Death of the Dancing Dolls, Portland, OR:
______. Heaved from the Earth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971.
Kopp, Karl, and Jane Kopp, eds. Southwest: A Contemporary Anthology. Albu-
Marken, Jack. Personal communication with Besmilr Moore Brigham. November
______. Personal communication with Roy Brigham, summer 1996.
--Jack Marken
edited by Gretchen M. Bataille and Laurie Lisa (c. Routledge, 2001)
May Emmons Moore, was born near Pace, Mississippi. She lived in this area and
in Jonesboro, Arkansas, for ten years before moving to Donna, Texas, where she
finished high school. Later she attended Mary Hardin-Baylor Women's College in
Belton, Texas, from which she graduated in 1935 with a BA degree in journalism.
There she met Roy Brigham, who was working for a local printer. They married in
1936 and spent the next few years moving from place to place in Texas, Okla-
homa, and Mississippi. During these years Roy worked as a typesetter and
Brigham wrote copy for local newspapers.
two years at the New School for Social Research. ``There is no school like it,'' she
says. Her major teachers there were Horace Gregory and Sidney Alexander. She
took courses in poetry and fiction and tried ``to get as far away from journalism as
possible,'' writing her works without punctuation or capitals. She also became in-
terested in the theater, particularly mime, and left journalism forever.
America, and Europe. Brigham was fascinated by her father's trips to work with
the Meskito Indians in Nicaragua and succeeded in tracing the same routes he had
followed there. These trips and their experiences among the Indians in the Ameri-
cas and Mexico provided material for the increasing amount of writing Brigham
was doing. Her own ancestry (her mother's father was half Choctaw) strongly in-
fluenced her. During the 1940s and 1950s, she thought of herself as a writer, and
she continued to fill notebooks with poems, essays, and stories that Roy helped her
with by collaborating, editing, and typing.
accepted for publication by Corno emplumada in Mexico City. Since then her
work has been included in numerous anthologies, including 31 New American
Poets (Hill and Wang, 1969), From the Belly of the Shark (Vintage Books, 1973),
and New Generation: Poetry (Ann Arbor Review, 1971). She is included in
Dorothy Abbot's Mississippi Writers (University Press of Mississippi, 1985), and
her work has appeared in many American literary magazines, from The Atlantic to
the Southern Review, from American and Canadian Poetry to West Coast Review.
Her stories have also selected for Martha Foley's Best Short Stories of 1972, Best
Short Stories of 1973, and Best Short Stories of 1983.
fascinated audiences for many years. Her readings and conversations have been
recorded at Southwest Minnesota State University, the University of Wisconsin at
LaCrosse and Green Bay, and at the Library of Congress.
near their daughter and her husband. Shortly afterward Besmilr was stricken with
Alzheimer's disease. Roy died in the fall of 1996.
Prensa de Lagar/Wine Press, 1969.
querque, NM: Red Earth, 1977.
19, 1990