Hettie Jones

Born Hettie Cohen in Brooklyn, New York, on July 16, 1934, Hettie Jones was raised in the Laurelton section of Queens. She attended Mary Washington College before going on to earn a BA in drama from the University of Virginia and pursue postgraduate work at Columbia University.

Jones’s first collection of poems, Drive (Hanging Loose Press, 1997), was selected by Naomi Shihab Nye to receive the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is also the author of How I Became Hettie Jones (Grove/Atlantic1990), a memoir of the Beat scene of the fifties and sixties, as well as of her marriage (1958–66) to LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka; Big Star Fallin’ Mama: Five Women in Black Music (The Viking Press, 1974); and several books for children.

With LeRoi Jones she established Yūgen (1957–63), a magazine that published poetry and writings by William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Philip Whalen, and others. She also launched Totem Press, which published poets such as Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Edward Dorn, Frank O’Hara, and Gary Snyder.

Jones was involved with PEN America’s prison writing committee and ran a writing workshop at the New York State Correctional Facility for Women in Bedford Hills. Jones also taught at The New School. She died in Philadelphia on August 13, 2024.