The Black Experience in Four Genres - Juanita, Judy

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Résumé :
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Biographie:
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 was a contributing editor for 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 for African and African-American Literature alongside other student activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). 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 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 has taught writing at Laney College in Oakland, California, since 1993.

Sommaire:
Four pieces in this text by writer Judy Juanita - a poem, drama, short story and essay - bring themes of adolescence self-determination & ethnic pride grief and regret, and the gun as romantic symbol or literal destruction, to college and high school students and to general readers. Questions for classroom or group use follow each piece. Each explores the black experience in different eras. The play is suitable for amateur theater productions or as a film script. The poem can be a monologue suitable for drama, speech, civics class or an audition. The play takes place in the 1950s: a rebellious teen wins an essay contest on Americanism but is angered that her best friend's more militant essay didn't win. Her conservative mother wants her to accept it proudly. The play takes about an hour to stage or read in class, with six main characters and three minor characters. The poem spans the black experience from slavery to the present in 344 words. The short story, 1,764 words, involves a modern independent woman picturing the child she never had. Abortion, memory, motherhood, and the power of the unknown haunt her. The essay debates the impact of the 1960s black militant infatuation with the gun and ensuing post -Trayvon Martin disenchantment....