Jones, Hettie 1934-

PERSONAL:

Born July 16, 1934, in Brooklyn, NY; daughter of Oscar (a businessman) and Lottie Cohen; married LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka; a writer), October 13, 1958 (divorced, 1966); children: Kellie, Lisa. Education: University of Virginia, Fredericksburg, B.A. (cum laude), 1955; Columbia University, graduate study, 1955-56.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. Agent—Elaine Markson, 44 Greenwich Ave., New York, NY 10011.

CAREER:

Columbia University Press, Center for Mass Communication, New York City, staff writer, 1955-57; Partisan Review, New York City, assistant to the editors, 1957-61; Eighth Street Bookshop, editorial services provider, 1964; University Books, New Hyde Park, NY, editor, 1965; Mobilization for Youth, New York City, 1967-69, staff writer, 1966-68, director of educational after-school program, 1968-70; Downtown Community School, New York City, substitute teacher, 1970-74; freelance editorial services (development, author contact, editor, copy editor, and proofreader), for clients including Aperture, Berkley, Bantam Books, Carol Publishing Group, Carroll & Graf, Crown Publishers, Dial Press, Grove Press, Fred Jordan Books, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Random House, Farrar, Straus, and various advertising agencies, 1965—; freelance writer, 1970—; Visual Education Corp., Princeton, NJ, writer of junior high school texts, 1983; Curriculum Concepts, Inc., writer of elementary and junior high school texts, features, and biography, 1984. Teacher of college-level writing courses: Sing Sing Prison Writing Workshop, spring, 1989; Bedford Hills, New York Correctional Facility Writing Workshop, 1989—; Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, NY, fiction workshop, 1980; City University of New York, Hunter College, fiction workshop, 1984; New York University, School for Continuing Education, Department of Arts, Sciences, and Humanities, Writing For Children and Young Adults, workshop, 1986-88; New York University, Gallatin Division, independent studies instructor, Introduction to Juvenile Fiction, spring, 1989; State University of New York at Purchase, Advanced Poetry Workshop, spring, 1988 and 1990, Advanced Fiction Workshop, fall, 1989 and 1991; The New School, Memoir class, fall, 1991; University of Wyoming, Department of English, classes in Memoir, Advanced Fiction, and graduate thesis advisor, spring, 1993, 1994; The 92nd Street Y, Poetry Center, Memoir, 1992—; Parsons School of Liberal Studies, WordWorks, An Approach to Writing, 1992—; Pennsylvania State University, visiting nonfiction writer, fall, 1997. New York State Council on the Arts, member of literature panel, 1994-96. Grace Church Opportunity Project, Day Care Council of Greater New York, HeadStart, program design, observation, evaluation, 1968-72, update, 1985; Henry Street Settlement, New York City, afterschool educator, 1971; Church of All Nations Day Care Center, community representative and chairperson of board of directors, 1972-76.

MEMBER:

PEN (co-chair of prison writing committee), Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS:

The Trees Stand Shining was chosen as a Notable Children's Book by American Library Association, 1971; New York Public Library, selected among Best Books for Young Adults, 1974, Best Books for the Teenage, 1995, and, Bank Street Child Study Children's Book Committee, Children's Book of the Year, all for Big Star Fallin' Mama, Five Women in Black Music; Distinguished Alumnus of Mary Washington College, 1992; listed in New York Times "Noted with Pleasure" column, "Recommended Summer Reading," "Notable 200 Books of 1990," and "New and Noteworthy Paperbacks," all for How I Became Hettie Jones, A Memoir; poem, "Mother America" selected for 1997 Anthology of Magazine Verse Yearbook of American Poetry; Norma Farber Award for first book of poetry, 1998, for Drive.

WRITINGS:

(Compiler) The Trees Stand Shining (selected Native American poems), Dial (New York, NY), 1971, reprinted as The Trees Stand Shining, Poetry of the North American Indians, 1993.

(Adaptor) Longhouse Winter (Iroquois transformation tales), Holt, Rinehart & Winston (New York, NY), 1972.

Coyote Tales (Native American legends), Holt, Rinehart & Winston (New York, NY), 1974.

Big Star Fallin' Mama, Five Women in Black Music (biographies for young adults), Viking (New York, NY), 1974, revised and updated, 1995.

Living with Wolves (children's nonfiction), Macmillan (New York, NY), 1975.

How to Eat Your ABCs: A Book about Vitamins (children's nonfiction), Four Winds Press/Scholastic (New York, NY), 1976.

I Hate to Talk about Your Mother (young adult novel), Delacorte (New York, NY), 1979.

Having Been Her (poetry and fiction collection), Number Press, 1981.

Missing Sweet Rose (young adult novel), Delacorte (New York, NY), 1984.

How I Became Hettie Jones, A Memoir, Dutton (New York, NY), 1990.

Four Hetties (chapbook; poetry), IKON Press, 1995.

Spooky Tales from Gullah Gullah Island, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1996.

(Author of preface), Bill Morgan, The Beat Generation in New York, A Walking Tour, City Lights Books (San Francisco, CA), 1997.

(With Alexander Smalls) Grace the Table: Stories and Cooking from My Southern Revival, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1997.

Drive (poetry collection), Hanging Loose Press (Brooklyn, NY), 1997.

All Told, Hanging Loose Press (Brooklyn, NY), 2003.

(With Rita Marley) No Woman No Cry: My Life with Bob Marley, Hyperion (New York, NY), 2004.

(With Jacqueline L. Tobin) From Midnight to Dawn: The Last Tracks of the Underground Railroad, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2007.

Doing 70 (poems), Hanging Loose Press (Brooklyn, NY), 2007.

NOVELIZATIONS

Forever Young, Forever Free (young adult), Berkeley Publishing (New York, NY), 1976.

Mustang Country, Pocket Books (New York, NY), 1976.

You Light up My Life, Pocket Books (New York, NY), 1977.

In Search of the Castaways (young adult), Pocket Books (New York, NY), 1979.

Promises in the Dark, Bantam (New York, NY), 1979.

EDITOR

Poems Now (anthology), Kulchur Press (New York, NY), 1966.

(And contributor) More In than Out, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility (Bedford Hills, NY), 1992.

Aliens at the Border (poetry and prose from the Writing Workshop, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility), Segue Books, 1997.

OTHER

Also author of "Action" series, Scholastic (New York, NY), 1977. Contributor of fiction to anthologies, including Secrets and Surprises, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1986; Time Capsule: A Concise Encyclopedia by Women Artists, Performers, and Writers, Creative Time, Inc. with S.O.S. International (New York, NY), 1995; and Women of the Beat, Conari Press, 1996. Contributor of poetry to anthologies, including Women Brave in the Face of Danger, Photographs and Writings by Latin and North American Women, edited by Margaret Randall, Crossing Press (Trumansburg, NY), 1985; El Signo de Gorrion, 1996; Ladies Start Your Engines, Faber and Faber (London, England), 1996; Women of the Beat, Conari Press, 1996; The Plain Truth of Things, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1997. Contributor to essays, interviews and other nonfiction to anthologies, including Bernstein Remembered, Carroll & Graf (New York, NY), 1991; The Portable Beat Reader and The Penguin Book of Beats (U.K.), Viking Penguin (New York, NY), 1992; In the Land of Confiscated Dreams, Writers & Readers (New York, NY), 1996; A Different Beat, High Risk Books, Serpent's Tail (London, England), 1997; and Generations: A Century of Women Speak about Their Lives, edited by Alison Malinovich, Grove Press, 1997.

Contributor of fiction to periodicals, including Frontier, A Journal of Women Studies, Giants Play Well in the Drizzle, IKON, Infinite Number, Noose, Ploughshares, and Village Voice Literary Supplement. Contributor of poetry to periodicals, including Flatiron News, Gratis, Hanging Loose, Heresies, IKON, Long Shot, Open City, Owen Wister Review, and others. Contributor of essays and reviews to periodicals, including Essence, Washington Post, Washington Post Book World, and others.

Editor and publisher with LeRoi Jones of Yugen (literary magazine), 1957-63, and chapbook series (including work by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso), 1960-63, both Totem Press Books (New York, NY).

SIDELIGHTS:

Hettie Jones once told CA: "Since 1957 I've been involved with literature and writers one way or another. I owned (with my husband) a small press (Totem), which published Ginsberg, Corso, O'Hara, Dorn, Gary Snyder, etc., and a magazine called Yugen. When I have time I like to write short stories for slow readers, textbook stories for Kids. Interest and competence: avant-garde jazz. I write novelizations to support my children and my writing habit. Have been totally self-employed since 1970, but am POOR." Jones also mentioned that she enjoys writing for children because "it's a challenge to simplify and clarify."

Jones later told CA: "In 1958, [I] married the as-yet unpublished poet LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka). One of the few visible interracial couples at that time, [we] had two children, coedited Yugen, an influential literary magazine, and were at the ‘hot center’ of the downtown Bohemian New York literary, jazz, and arts worlds. It is this story of [our] life together, and [our] acquaintance with other outstanding figures of that era, that is told in How I Became Hettie Jones: A Memoir." The Kirkus Review called the book ‘a lively, candid account’ and ‘a splendid job’ that is ‘always insightful and frequently amusing.’ Russell Banks praised the ‘clarity of her writing;’ Gloria Naylor said that the book ‘becomes every woman's story in the search for a center and a love of self;’ Jamaica Kincaid called it a book ‘every American ought to read;’ and Lawrence Ferlingetti said: ‘a feminist scrutiny such as this is just what those lost decades needed, as the Beats themselves needed it.’"

Jones noted that she "lives in Manhattan's East Village, where she can be seen on her bicycle rain or shine." She "has completed In Care of Worth Auto Parts, a collection of stories." She has also contributed poetry to Your House Is Mine, a book and street project by Bullet Space Urban Artists Collaborative in the New York Museum of Contemporary Art, New York City and to Lost and/or Gained, Artist and Homeless Collaborative, Visual Arts Gallery, Henry Street Settlement, New York City, 1993. She is a frequent speaker and lecturer, and gives readings of her works, having appeared at over one hundred museums, public libraries, universities, colleges, schools, commercial and public radio stations, theatres, festivals, churches and synagogues, foundations, bookstores, cafes, and award ceremonies. Her work as a writing teacher at Bedford Hills, a maximum-security women's prison north of Manhattan, led to publication of a poetry anthology by her inmate-students, Aliens at the Border, which Jones edited. This book, Jones wrote in her introduction, "is not just a collection of ‘prison writings.’" As Nation reviewer Chuck Wachtel pointed out, it contains "a gathering of varied and remarkable voices, and the poems they narrate from their side of a border that we can cross, but they cannot, are possessed of a genuine, lyrical beauty."

Jones did not publish her own first collection, Drive, until she was in her mid-fifties and had been writing for thirty years. The book won the Norma Farber Award for first book of poetry in 1998. "My mother told me that I'd be a jack of all trades and a master of none," she remarked in an interview posted on Artful Dodge. "I'm glad to have won my prize—it makes me a master at one thing." Booklist reviewer Donna Seaman praised the volume for its intelligence, compassion, and power, noting that the book "will establish [Jones] as a potent and fearless poet." All Told, her second collection, earned similar accolades. Seaman, again writing in Booklist, described the book as a "seemingly blithe but actually rock-solid and womanly wise collection" in which Jones "writes sexily about" everyday pleasures such as food, home life, and her neighborhood. She also muses on death, and in several poems reflects on the trauma of 9/11. The collection, according to World Literature Today contributor Rochelle Owens, offers "an engaging meditation from the personal to the collective that is often subjective and transformative and touches upon a variety of themes, including that of cultural heritage in the context of rabid hatred and murder." Expressing particular admiration for the poem "Caught, April 2002—A Prayer for Peace," a directly political work about religion-inspired terrorism, Owens added that the diversity of the collection offers many different rewards.

Doing 70, Jones's third collection of poems, presents work that, according to Jewish Daily Forward writer David Kaufmann, are "models of emotional engagement." Jones's best work, said Kaufmann, balances everyday diction with "capacious Zen openness," moving from moments of mundane reality such as ordinary chores "only to end with expressions of unexpected joy."

Jones has also written a range of nonfiction books, including Grace the Table: Stories and Cooking from My Southern Revival, a book on food that she cowrote with Alexander Smalls, and No Woman No Cry: My Life with Bob Marley, the memoir that she helped Rita Marley write about her life as the wife of the reggae superstar. The book received considerable attention, with many reviewers citing its engaging and inspiring story. Rita Anderson, who grew up poor in Jamaica, married Marley before he became famous and remained his wife until his premature death at age 36. Yet the marriage was often extremely rocky. The couple lived apart for many extended periods, and Rita endured poverty, neglect, and her husband's numerous infidelities. Once Marley achieved international success, Rita faced the different pressures of wealth and fame. Through these difficulties, she writes, she decided to be strong and endure. She chronicles her life in book that is "moving [and] sometimes frustrating," according to New York Times Book Review contributor Kelefa Sanneh. What is most interesting about the book, in Sanneh's view, is how much Rita Marley does not tell. A Kirkus Reviews writer, on the other hand, observed that "Marley doesn't mince her words" in this book, and summed the memoir up as "tart, self-assured, and lasting."

Among Jones's several notable titles for children are the young adult novel I Hate to Talk about Your Mother and Big Star Fallin' Mama, Five Women in Black Music, a collection of biographies of such figures as Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and Aretha Franklin. With Jacqueline L. Tobin, Smith wrote From Midnight to Dawn: The Last Tracks of the Underground Railroad, which Booklist reviewer Vanessa Bush deemed a "fascinating" account of the various Canadian communities where American slaves settled after fleeing bondage via the Underground Railroad.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, February 15, 1995, Jeanne Triner, review of Big Star Fallin' Mama, Five Women in Black Music, p. 1068; October 15, 1997, Mark Knoblauch, review of Grace the Table: Stories and Cooking from My Southern Revival, p. 374; February 15, 1998, Donna Seaman, review of Drive, p. 969; April 15, 2003, Donna Seaman, review of All Told, p. 1443; March 1, 2004, Mike Tribby, review of No Woman No Cry: My Life with Bob Marley, p. 1129; March 1, 2007, Vanessa Bush, review of From Midnight to Dawn: The Last Tracks of the Underground Railroad, p. 58.

Book Report, September 1, 1995, Marie Ramsey, review of Big Star Fallin' Mama, p. 48.

Bookwatch, August 1, 2004, review of No Woman No Cry, p. 3.

Center for Children's Books Bulletin, May 1, 1980, review of I Hate to Talk about Your Mother, p. 174.

Entertainment Weekly, May 7, 2004, Bob Cannon, review of No Woman No Cry, p. 92.

Horn Book, September 1, 1995, Lolly Robinson, review of Big Star Fallin' Mama, p. 627.

Jewish Daily Forward, June 19, 2007, David Kaufmann, "Beat This."

Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2004, review of No Woman No Cry, p. 119; October 15, 2006, review of From Midnight to Dawn, p. 1062.

Library Journal, March 1, 2004, Bill Walker, review of No Woman, No Cry, p. 81.

Nation, December 8, 1997, Chuck Wachtel, review of Aliens at the Border, p. 34.

New York Times Book Review, March 11, 1990, Susan Brownmiller, "The Bride of LeRoi Jones"; May 2, 2004, Kelefa Sanneh, "Marley's Ghost."

Publishers Weekly, April 21, 2003, review of All Told, p. 59; February 16, 2004, review of No Woman No Cry, p. 162; November 6, 2006, review of From Midnight to Dawn, p. 49.

Reading Teacher, March 1, 1995, review of Coyote Tales, p. 495.

Rolling Stone, June 10, 2004, Gaylord Fields, review of No Woman No Cry, p. 99.

School Library Journal, May 1, 1980, Joan Scherer Brewer, review of I Hate to Talk about Your Mother, p. 76; March 1, 1995, Robin Works Davis, review of Big Star Fallin' Mama, p. 230.

Wilson Library Bulletin, May 1, 1980, Patty Campbell, review of I Hate to Talk about Your Mother, p. 584.

World Literature Today, September 1, 2004, Rochelle Owens, review of All Told, p. 100.

ONLINE

Artful Dodge,http://www.wooster.edu/artfuldodge/ (July 23, 2007), interview with Hettie Jones.