Hettie Jones
Hettie Jones ( born June 15, 1934 in Brooklyn, New York City as Hettie Cohen ) is an American Beat author.
Life
Betty Cohen was born as the daughter of a Jewish immigrant family. She studied at the University of Virginia and later at Columbia University Theatre Studies.
When working at the jazz magazine " The Record Changer" she learned in 1957 the black music critic and poet LeRoi Jones know. A year later they were married, to the dismay of Hetties family. They had two daughters, Kellie and Lisa. Her parents pressed Jones to leave the kids drive off in both cases, after she did not, she disinherited her. Even after her divorce from LeRoi Jones Hettie 1966 remained rooted in the black community. Her daughter Lisa, today even a successful writer, sees itself " as black with a white mother. "
Both spouses were more active part of the then beat scene in Greenwich Village. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane were among the regular guests in the apartment.
Hettie supported her husband financially, which allowed him his lyrical work. Jones himself hesitated long to publish their own work: Joyce Johnson remembers Hettie 's " silence " as a young writer, " she writes poetry herself, but Has never Stood up with it at a reading of her own, makes no particular mention of it, in fact- telling herself It Is not good enough ". She herself wrote in her Autiobiographie over the former role model, she was also in the Beat scene, exposed: Men had little use for on outspoken woman, I'd been warned. What I wanted, I was told, what security and upward mobility, Which might also be mine if I learned to shut my mouth.
Together, the pair was from 1957 to 1963 the literary magazine Yugen out, appeared in the works of famous writers of the Beat Generation, such as William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Philip Whalen.
Jones was known mainly by their Autiobiographie How I Became Hettie Jones. In it she describes on the one hand the former Beat scene. On the other hand, it reflects their position as white Jewish wife of a black man. They even confronted besides, numerous social conflicts and must find their position within it. As poetically ambitious woman in a scene that looked as Jack Kerouac Chicks in words, women. As a Jew in a predominant non-Jewish society, who wanted her to preserve its Jewish. As a woman who saw herself as a little white because she was Jewish, but was regarded by the African-American community than white. As a mother of two colored children who were not acceptable from the perspective of the white society. Your name plays a crucial role in the processes of identity formation, they lived through. She begins the book as in real life, with Hettie Cohen H. Cohen- Jones, Mrs. Hettie Jones and Hettie Hettie Jones to.
Your 1997 published volume of poetry Drive won several awards, including the 1999 Norma Faber Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her poems and short stories appear among others in the Village Voice, The Washington Post, The Boston Phoenix and Ploughshares.
Jones also founded the publishing Totem Press, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Frank O'Hara, Edward Dorn, and Gary Snyder was one of his authors. As part of its work in the U.S. PEN association she sat very committed to promoting literacy through writing courses in U.S. prisons.
Jones still lives in Greenwich Village and is a lecturer in creative writing at the New School University.
Works
- Now Poems, 1968
- Longhouse Winter, 1972
- Living with Wolves, 1975
- Having Been ago, 1981
- How I Became Hettie Jones: A Memoir, 1990 Extract (English ) - autobiography
- Drive, 1997; Hanging Loose Press - Poems
- All I Told, All Told - poems
- No Woman No Cry; along with Rita Marley, 2004 ISBN 0-330-49330-2 - Biography of Rita Marley