Judy Juanita is an American poet, novelist and playwright. She is a Lecturer in the College Writing Programs at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant un ...

. She was formerly a writing teacher at

Laney College Laney College is a public community college in Oakland, California. Laney is the largest of the four colleges of the Peralta Community College District which serves northern Alameda County. Laney College is named after Joseph Clarence Laney. Th ...

. In 1968, while attending San Francisco State, Juanita served as editor-in-chief of '' The Black Panther'', the newspaper of the

Black Panther Party The Black Panther Party (BPP), originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was a Marxism-Leninism, Marxist-Leninist and Black Power movement, black power political organization founded by college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. New ...

. 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.

Biography

Juanita was born Judith Hart in

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and E ...

, and grew up in

Oakland Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third largest city overall in the Bay ...

. At age 16, she began attending Oakland City College, transferring to

San Francisco State University San Francisco State University (commonly referred to as San Francisco State, SF State and SFSU) is a public research university in San Francisco. As part of the 23-campus California State University system, the university offers 118 different ...

as a junior. She was a member of the Black Student Union. After

Huey P. Newton Huey Percy Newton (February 17, 1942 – August 22, 1989) was an African-American revolutionary, notable as founder of the Black Panther Party. Newton crafted the Party's ten-point manifesto with Bobby Seale in 1966. Under Newton's leadership ...

and

Bobby Seale Robert George Seale (born October 22, 1936) is an American political activist and author. Seale is widely known for co-founding the Black Panther Party with fellow activist Huey P. Newton. Founded as the "Black Panther Party for Self-Defense", ...

recruited at the university, she joined the BPP in 1967 and lived in one of their safe houses on Potrero Hill. while she edited '' The Black Panther'', the Party's newspaper, and worked on the BPP's Free Breakfast for Children program. She received her BA in psychology and MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State. Juanita taught at

as a Black Psychology and Black Journalism instructor in the first Black Studies program in the United States. 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 The Pushcart Prize is an American literary prize published by Pushcart Press that honors the best "poetry, short fiction, essays or literary whatnot" published in the small presses over the previous year. Magazine and small book press editors are ...

. 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), 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.A Few Things Judy Juanita’s De Facto Feminism Got Me Thinking About
/ref> 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 Nichiren Buddhism ( ja, 日蓮仏教), also known as Hokkeshū ( ja, 法華宗, meaning ''Lotus Sect'') is a branch of Mahayana Buddhism based on the teachings of the 13th-century Japanese Buddhist priest Nichiren (1222–1282) and is one ...

with

Soka Gakkai International Soka Gakkai International (SGI) is an international Nichiren Buddhist organisation founded in 1975 by Daisaku Ikeda, as an umbrella organization of Soka Gakkai, which declares approximately 12 million adherents in 192 countries and territorie ...

. 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.

References

External links

Juanita's writings
at The Weeklings
JudyJuanita.comUC Berkeley Faculty biography page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Juanita, Judy 1940s births Living people African-American activists Activists for African-American civil rights African-American poets American poets American women dramatists and playwrights Members of the Black Panther Party Nichiren Buddhists Poets from California San Francisco State University alumni San Francisco State University faculty Writers from Berkeley, California 20th-century American women 21st-century American women African-American women writers