July 16, 1934 - August 13, 2024

Author and poet Hettie Jones, who chronicled the Beat scene of the 1950s and ‘60s in her celebrated memoir, How I Became Hettie Jones, passed away on August 13 surrounded by her family.  She was 90 years old.

Hettie Roberta Cohen was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1934. She earned a B.A in drama from Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and returned to New York to pursue postgraduate work at Columbia University.  In 1958, Hettie married the as-yet-unpublished poet LeRoi Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka. One of the most visible interracial couples at that time, they had two children, and were at the heart of the downtown bohemian New York literary, jazz, and art worlds.  With Baraka, she established Yugen, an influential literary magazine that published poetry and writings by William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Philip Whalen, and others. Together, they also launched Totem Press, which published poets Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Frank O'Hara, Edward Dorn, and Gary Snyder.

Hettie Jones authored over 20 books, the first in 1971 and the most recent in 2016 (a memoir, Love, H, which draws on her 40-year correspondence with artist Helene Dorn, who was married to poet Ed Dorn).  Jones is perhaps best known for How I Became Hettie Jones (1990), her memoir of the beat scene of the fifties and sixties and of her marriage to poet, playwright, essayist Amiri Baraka. The Kirkus Review called the book “a lively, candid account’; Russell Banks praised “the clarity of her writing”; Gloria Naylor said that the book “becomes every woman’s story in the search for a center and a love of self”; Jamaica Kincaid called it a book “every American ought to read”; and Lawrence Ferlinghetti said, “a feminist scrutiny such as this is just what those lost decades needed, as the Beats themselves needed it.” The New York Times recommended the book on its list of 200 Notable Books of 1990, and its “New and Noteworthy” paperback list in 1991. 

Jones’s first collection of poems, Drive, published by Hanging Loose Press in 1997, was hailed by Booklist as the work of a “potent and fearless poet,” and was selected by Naomi Shihab Nye to receive the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Drive was followed by poetry collections All Told (2003) and Doing 70 (2007).

Jones’s books for children and young adults include an ALA Notable, The Trees Stand Shining, published in 1971 and reissued in 1993, and Big Star Fallin’ Mama (Five Women In Black Music), a collection of biographies of five influential African-American singers, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Mahalia Jackson, Billie Holiday, and Aretha Franklin.  Big Star Fallin’ Mama was selected in 1974 by the New York Public Library as one of the 20 best new books for young adults. Reissued in 1995 in a revised hardcover edition, it was listed by the New York Public Library as recommended reading for teens and included on Bank Street’s list of Children's Books of the Year. 

In addition to her own work, Jones also wrote No Woman No Cry for Rita Marley, Grace the Table for the chef Alexander Smalls, and co-authored From Midnight to Dawn, the Last Tracks of the Underground Railroad. Her short fiction appeared in various literary journals such as Ploughshares and Fence, and she published reviews, articles, and stories in The Washington Post and The Village Voice, among others.

Jones was a longtime editor for major publishing houses, taught writing at various universities, and was on the faculties of the New School’s Creative Writing (MFA) program and the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center. A former chair of the PEN Prison Writing Committee, for almost 15 years Jones conducted a writing workshop at New York State’s Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, from which she edited a poetry collection, Aliens at the Border (Hanging Loose Press). “A gathering of remarkable voices.  This collection is a testament to the fact that the mind and the heart cannot be confined,” said the writer Chuck Wachtel.

In the early 2000s, Jones famously won a real estate battle against the Cooper Square Hotel, a luxury tower which now incorporates the East Village tenement where she raised her daughters and hosted renowned artists and writers in her fourth-floor walk-up.  The building dates back to 1845 and the hotel owners originally planned to demolish it, but Jones’s protected artist’s loft status derailed that plan. The redesigned structure fused the modern tower with the old tenement. The hotel, now the Standard East Village, eventually allowed the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation to install a plaque on the building’s facade commemorating Hettie Jones and the other artists who lived there, and Jones came to be known by the hotel as “the Legend Upstairs.”

Jones is survived by her daughters, Kellie Jones and Lisa Jones Brown, her granddaughter,  Zoe Margaret Hettie Chapman Brown, her sons-in-law Guthrie P. Ramsey and Kenneth S. Brown, and many loving relatives, including Robert Ramsey, Candace Ramsey Brown, Bridget Ramsey Russell, and the Harvest and Archie families.