Judy Juanita
AUTHOR

Judy Juanita

Literature & Fiction
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Judy Juanita's poetry collection, Manhattan my ass, you're in Oakland (EquiDistance Press, 2021), won the American Book Award 2021 from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her poem "Bling" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012. Her second poetry collection, Gawdzilla, (EquiDistance Press, 2022), examines race, marriage, family, abortion, and other massive social changes since 1954 when Godzilla, the horror movie, and the Supreme Court ruling on integration, Brown v. Bd. of Ed, Topeka, Ks., occurred. Gawdzilla ends with "The Gun as Performance Poem," a long prose poem that was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2014; in it she traces her history with activism, beginning with joining the Black Panther Party (BPP) in the sixties and editing its newspaper. Winner of the Tartt Fiction Prize at the University of West Alabama [UWA], her short story collection, The High Price of Freeways, was published by Livingston Press [UWA] in 2022. In a starred review ("compelling and challenging collection"), Kirkus Reviews states: these "short stories set in Northern California and the New York metropolitan area raise plenty of questions without offering easy answers [about] questions of belonging, equity, love, and responsibility." One of the stories titled "The Black House" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2022. Judy Juanita's debut novel, Virgin Soul, chronicled a black female coming of age in the 60s who joins the Black Panther Party [Viking, 2013]. Novelist Jean Thompson said of Virgin Soul: "Hard to believe it's been almost fifty years since the formation of the Black Panthers. The novel captures that time's particular combination of violence and possibility, and the urgency of young people who invested everything in the possibility of change, even as grand rhetoric was undercut by very human failings.” Her collection of essays, DeFacto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland (EquiDistance Press, 2016), examines the intersectionality of race, gender, politics, economics and spirituality as experienced by a black activist and self-described "feminist foot soldier." She is a contributing editor at The Weekling, an online journal, where many of the essays appeared. The collection was a distinguished finalist in OSU's 2016 Non/Fiction Collection Prize. Her work is archived at Duke University's John Hope Franklin Research Center at Duke Libraries alongside the work of SNCC activists from the 1960s. Crab Orchard Review's Allison Joseph said Juanita's fiction “should be required reading for anyone studying the vicissitudes of recent American history." Juanita's short stories and essays appear widely, and her poetry has appeared in KONCH, Obsidian II, 13th Moon, Painted Bride Quarterly, Croton Review, The Passaic Review, Lips, New Verse News, Poetry Monthly and Drumrevue 2000. In drama, Juanita’s themes are social issues overlaid with absurdity, humor and pathos (in one play, a distraught nurse whose teenage son has overdosed falls head over heels in love with a duck). Her seventeenth play, “Theodicy,” about two black men who accidentally fall into the river of death, won first runner-up of 186 plays in the Eileen Heckart 2008 Senior Drama Competition at Ohio State University She was awarded New Jersey Arts Council Fellowships for her poetry and earned an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. She teaches writing at University of California, Berkeley. She appears in Netflix's Last Chance U:Season 5, Laney College where she taught writing for over two decades.
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