Judy Juanita | |
---|---|
Born | Judith Hart 1946or1947(age 77–78) [1] Berkeley, California, U.S. |
Judy Juanita is an American poet, novelist and playwright. She is a Lecturer in the College Writing Programs at the University of California, Berkeley. She was formerly a writing teacher at Laney College. In 1968, while attending San Francisco State, Juanita served as editor-in-chief of The Black Panther , the newspaper of the Black Panther Party. [2] In her semi-autobiographical novel, Virgin Soul, (Viking, 2013), a black teen starts community college in Oakland, struggles to matriculate and then joins the Black Panther Party (BPP). The story of the female foot soldier in the black power movement, Virgin Soul exposes the unheralded women working behind-the-scenes in the BPP and the black student movement..
Juanita's writing is archived at Duke University in the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History & Culture, alongside the archives of student activists from SNCC.
Eleven of her plays are archived at the Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute, Ohio State University (OSU), where her full-length play, "Theodicy," won a major prize in the Eileen Heckart Senior Play Competition 2008.
Juanita was born Judith Hart in Berkeley, California, and grew up in Oakland. [1] At age 16, she began attending Oakland City College, transferring to San Francisco State University as a junior. She was a member of the Black Student Union. After Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale recruited at the university, she joined the BPP in 1967 and lived in one of their safe houses on Potrero Hill. [3] while she edited The Black Panther , the Party's newspaper, and worked on the BPP's Free Breakfast for Children program. [2] She received her BA in psychology and MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State.
Juanita taught at San Francisco State University as a Black Psychology and Black Journalism instructor in the first Black Studies program in the United States. [4]
Juanita attended the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley in 1992.
From 1992-2007, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, political theater in the parks, toured "Knocked Up" which she co-wrote with Tina Tree Murch. The play, a musical, was a commedia dell'arte: when a young villager becomes pregnant and is refused the morning-after pill, a mysterious comet causes all the males in the village to become pregnant. By play's end, they've come around to approving the RU486, as the morning after pill was called.
In 2012 she attended the Vermont Studio Center and Breadloaf writers' conferences. In 2013, Juanita's poem "Bling" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 2015, her essay "The Gun as Ultimate Performance Poem" was also nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has written 17 plays that have been performed in the Bay Area, L.A., NYC, Winston-Salem, and Minneapolis.
A distinguished finalist in OSU's Non/Fiction Collection Prize 2016, her collection of essays is the account of the feminist foot soldier. DeFacto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland (EquiDistance Press, 2016) was a Book-of-the-Month selection in March, 2017, at Kirkus Reviews (where it also received a positive review [5] ), and at African Americans on the Move Book Club (AAMBC) in December, 2016. A lengthy critical review of the collection by poet-musician-activist Chris Stroffolino appears in Ishmael Reed's magazine KONCH in December, 2016. [6]
In 2014 and 2015, Juanita's short story collection The High Cost of Freeways was a finalist in the Donna Tartt First Fiction Contest. Her short story "Cabbie" appears in Akashic Press' noir series, Oakland Noir, published in 2017.
Juanita has been a Buddhist since 1980, practicing Nichiren Buddhism with Soka Gakkai International. [4]
Judy Juanita’s recent poems appear in New Verse News, an online political poetry blog. She appears also in the 2020 Netflix documentary, Last Chance U: Season 5, LANEY College.
In 2024 she received a Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN Oakland.
Leroy Eldridge Cleaver was an American writer and political activist who became an early leader of the Black Panther Party.
Merritt College is a public community college in Oakland, California, United States. Merritt, like the other three campuses of the Peralta Community College District, is accredited by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges. The college enrolls approximately 6,000 students.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an Indian-born American author, poet, and the Betty and Gene McDavid Professor of Writing at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. Her short story collection, Arranged Marriage, won an American Book Award in 1996. Two of her novels, as well as a short story were adapted into films.
Leslie Scalapino was an American poet, experimental prose writer, playwright, essayist, and editor, sometimes grouped in with the Language poets, though she felt closely tied to the Beat poets. A longtime resident of California's Bay Area, she earned an M.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. One of Scalapino's most critically well-received works is Way, a long poem which won the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award.
Opal Palmer Adisa is a Jamaican and American poet, novelist, performance artist and educator. Anthologized in more than 400 publications, she has been a regular performer of her work internationally. Professor Emeritus at California College of the Arts, Adisa is also the current Director of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus in Jamaica, where she currently resides.
Pat Parker was an African American poet and activist. Both her poetry and her activism drew from her experiences as a Black lesbian feminist. Her poetry spoke about her tough childhood growing up in poverty, dealing with sexual assault, and the murder of a sister. At eighteen, Parker was in an abusive relationship and had a miscarriage after being pushed down a flight of stairs. After two divorces, she came out as a lesbian, "embracing her sexuality" and said she was liberated and "knew no limits when it came to expressing the innermost parts of herself".
Cornelia Nixon is an American novelist, short-story writer, and teacher. She has lived much of her mature life in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The Black Panther Party was a Marxist–Leninist and black power political organization founded by college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in October 1966 in Oakland, California. The party was active in the United States between 1966 and 1982, with chapters in many major American cities, including San Francisco, New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Philadelphia. They were also active in many prisons and had international chapters in the United Kingdom and Algeria. Upon its inception, the party's core practice was its open carry patrols ("copwatching") designed to challenge the excessive force and misconduct of the Oakland Police Department. From 1969 onward, the party created social programs, including the Free Breakfast for Children Programs, education programs, and community health clinics. The Black Panther Party advocated for class struggle, claiming to represent the proletarian vanguard.
Samiya A. Bashir is a queer American artist, poet, and author. Much of Bashir's poetry explores the intersections of culture, change, and identity through the lens of race, gender, the body and sexuality. She is currently the June Jordan visiting professor at Columbia University of New York. Bashir is the first black woman recipient of the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature. She was also the third black woman to serve as tenured professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Jaykub Allen Hurley was an American author of short fiction. Hurley was a native of Oakland, California and published stories in Southern Review and Mid-American Review. He died in an accidental hit and run while walking alone on a country road in Missoula, Montana on May 28, 2008.
Chana Bloch was an American poet, translator, and scholar. She was a professor emerita of English at Mills College in Oakland, California.
Ericka Huggins is an American activist, writer, and educator. She is a former leading member of the political organization, Black Panther Party (BPP). She was married to fellow BPP member John Huggins in 1968.
Marvin X is a poet, playwright, and essayist.
Beth Ann Fennelly is an American poet and prose writer and was the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
Elmaz Abinader is an American author, poet, performer, English professor at Mills College and co-founder of the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA). She is of Lebanese descent. In 2000, she received the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award for her poetry collection In the Country of My Dreams....
Rickey Vincent is an American author, historian, and radio host based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the author of Funk: The Music, the People and the Rhythm of The One, which encompasses the history of funk music, and won the ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor Award for Music Writing in 1997.
Elizabeth Inness-Brown is an American novelist, short story writer, educator, and contributing editor at Boulevard. She is a retired professor of English at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont and lives in South Hero, Vermont—one of three islands comprising Grand Isle County—with her husband and son. Inness-Brown has published a novel, Burning Marguerite, as well as two short story collections, titled Here and Satin Palms. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, North American Review, Boulevard, Glimmer Train, Madcap Review, and various other journals. Inness-Brown received a National Endowment for the Arts grant for Writing in 1983 and has done writing residencies at Yaddo and The Millay Colony for the Arts. In 1982, her short story "Release, Surrender" appeared in Volume VII of the Pushcart Prize.
The Black Panther was the official newspaper of the Black Panther Party. It began as a four-page newsletter in Oakland, California, in 1967, and was founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. It was the main publication of the Party and was soon sold in several large cities across the United States, as well as having an international readership. The newspaper distributed information about the party's activities, and expressed through articles the ideology of the Black Panther Party, focusing on both international revolutions as inspiration and contemporary racial struggles of African Americans across the United States. It remained in circulation until the dissolution of the Party in 1980.
Barbara Easley-Cox is a civil rights activist, best known for her involvement with the Black Panther Party. At the time of her first involvement, she was attending San Francisco State University. She now works in Philadelphia with a focus on literacy and education for youth.