Hettie Jones

Best known for How I Became Hettie Jones, her memoir of the “Beat Scene,” Hettie Jones is the author of 24 books for children and adults, including the award-winning Big Star Fallin’ Mama, Five Women in Black Music. Drive, her first poetry collection, won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber Award; it was followed by second and third collections, All Told and Doing 70.  Love, H, selections from her 40-year correspondence with the sculptor Helene Dorn, appeared this past October from Duke University Press, and is available in both print and e-book editions. Jones’s short prose has been published in journals such as The Village Voice, Global City Review, Fence, and Ploughshares, and there are numerous interviews and some of her performances online. In addition to her own work, Jones has authored memoirs for Rita Marley (No Woman No Cry) and others, and taught writing in colleges, prisons, and community settings. The former Chair of PEN’s Prison Writing Committee, she currently teaches graduate writing at The New School, and a memoir workshop at the 92^nd Street Y.