Princes & Pumpkins

David Hatfield Sparks, M.M., M.L.I.S., is a writer, composer, ethnomusicologist, and librarian. Sparks began writing and performing in the late 1960s (poetry, theater, music) in Indiana, Ohio, and New York City. A more intense period of creativity followed in the late 1970s, when he joined in rag-tag performances of the multicultural LGBTQ art community that played a significant part in San Francisco's "cultural worker" movement, fostered by radical Queer, Leftist artists. His first published poems appeared in the radical Boston underground publication Fag Rag (no. 25) in 1979. Together with his partner, Randy P. Conner, his close friend Gloria Anzaldúa, and other writers and artists affiliated with the El Mundo Zurdo poetry reading series, he performed in the early 1980s at the independent bookstore Small Press Traffic in San Francisco's Noe Valley district and at other venues including the Valencia Rose Café and the Women's Building. He contributed to Queer-focused anthologies and organized Queer poetry events in Austin, Texas, where he obtained a Master's in Ethnomusicology. His work has appeared in various scholarly journals and anthologies. He is the co-author of the Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol, and Spirit (Cassell, 1997) and of Queering Creole Spiritual Traditions (Haworth/Routledge, 2004). His personal/political essay "Hecklers and Christians" appeared in the anthology First Person Queer: Who we are (so far) in 2007. Recently, his mythobiographical poem "The Birth of Xochiquetzal at 948 Noe St." appeared in 2012 in the Goddess-centered anthology, She is Everywhere (vol. 3).