Poet and Author Hettie Jones Will Speak about the ‘Beat Generation’ Feb. 26

Author and award-winning poet Hettie Jones will speak and read from her memoir, How I Became Hettie Jones, 7 p.m. Monday, Feb. 26 in Kirby Hall of Civil Rights room 104, as part of Lafayette’s Women’s History Month celebration.

Jones, born Hettie Cohen, was part of the cultural, social, and artistic movement of the late fifties and sixties that became know as the “Beat Generation.”

As the wife of controversial African American playwright and poet LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), Hettie Jones, a white Jew from Queens, N.Y., was deeply involved in underground publishing in the late 1950s. She and Jones established Totem Press and Yugen, a literary journal that provided a forum for many poets of the time period. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1965, due partially, she implies, to social pressures to end interracial marriages.

Her lecture, “An Other or Another: How Do You Cross Borders?” will focus on How I Became Hettie Jones (1990), a memoir that details her involvement in the Beat community and her marriage to Le Roi Jones. It also includes glimpses into her relationships with Allen Ginsberg, Thelonious Monk, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, Franz Kline, and others.

In 1999, her collection of poetry, Drive, won the Norma Farber Award for a first book of poetry. She is also the author of numerous children’s books.

Lafayette’s Women’s History Month events are sponsored by the Women’s Studies program, Office of Intercultural Development, Lafayette Activities Forum, Office of Student Life, Association of Lafayette Feminists, Dean of Studies, American Studies department, anthropology and sociology department, College Writing Program, English department, economics and business department, Policy Studies program, and Counseling Center.

For more information about the celebration, contact Carolynn Van Dyke, March Professor of English and coordinator of Women’s Studies.