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How I Became Hettie Jones book cover
How I Became Hettie Jones
1990
First Published
4.06
Average Rating
256
Number of Pages
Greenwich Village in the 1950s was a haven to which young poets, painters, and jazz musicians flocked. Among them was Hettie Cohen, who'd been born into a middle-class Jewish family in Queens and who'd chosen to cross racial barriers to marry the controversial black poet LeRoi Jones. Theirs was a bohemian life in the awakening East Village of underground publishing and jazz lofts, through which drifted such icons of the generation as Allen Ginsberg, Thelonious Monk, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara, Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, and Franz Kline.
Avg Rating
4.06
Number of Ratings
628
5 STARS
34%
4 STARS
44%
3 STARS
19%
2 STARS
3%
1 STARS
1%
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Author

Hettie Jones
Hettie Jones
Author · 7 books

Hettie Jones (born 1934 as Hettie Cohen) is best known as the first wife of Amiri Baraka, known as LeRoi Jones at the time of their marriage, but is also a writer herself. While known for her poetry, she has received acclaim for her memoir, How I Became Hettie Jones (published 1990 by Grove Press). Jones held various clerical jobs at Partisan Review and started the literary magazine Yugen with her husband. Jones is currently on the faculty in the graduate program in creative writing at The New School in New York City. From 1989-2002 she ran a writing workshop at the New York State Correctional Facility for Women at Bedford Hills, which included inmate Judy Clark as a student, and which published a nationally distributed collection, Aliens At The Border. Jones is a former chair of the PEN Prison Writing Committee and is currently a member of PEN's Advisory Council. (from Wikipedia)

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