Hettie Jones

Hettie Jones (1934-2024) was the author of over twenty books, the first in 1971 and the most recent in 2016 (a memoir, Love, H, which draws on her forty-year correspondence with artist Helene Dorn). Jones is perhaps best known for How I Became Hettie Jones (1990), her memoir of the beat scene of the fifties and sixties and of her marriage to poet, playwright, and essayist LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. With LeRoi Jones, she established Yugen (1957-1963), a magazine that published poetry and writings by William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Philip Whalen, and others. They also launched Totem Press, which published poets such as Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Frank O’Hara, Edward Dorn, and Gary Snyder. Jones’s first collection of poems, Drive (Hanging Loose Press, 1998), was selected by Naomi Shihab Nye to receive the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. She went on to publish two more collections. Jones was also the author of several books for children, including Big Star Fallin’ Mama: Five Women in Black Music (1974). Jones taught writing at various universities, and was on the faculties of the New School’s Creative Writing MFA program and the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center. A former chair of the PEN Prison Writing Committee, for almost fifteen years Jones conducted a writing workshop at New York state’s Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, from which she edited a poetry collection, Aliens at the Border (Hanging Loose Press, 1986).