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by Judy Juanita (Author)
Memoir by American Book Award winner Judy Juanita. California Fever Dream chronicles Juanita's 60 years as a writer and activist. Judy Juanita is an award-winning poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist and playwright. At San Francisco State University in the 1960s, Juanita joined fellow student protesters to revolutionize American higher education and create the nation's first Black Studies department. Juanita was the editor-in-chief of The Black Panther, the newspaper of the Black Panther Party. Her semi-autobiographical debut novel, Virgin Soul (Viking, 2013), features a young woman in the 1960s who joins the Black Panther Party. Her work is archived at Duke University's John Hope Franklin Research Center, alongside the work of SNCC activists from the 1960s. De Facto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland (EquiDistance, 2016) explores key shifts and contradictions in Juanita's own artistic development as it explores black and female empowerment. She is a winner of the American Book Award (2021) for Manhattan my ass, you're in Oakland, a poetry collection. Juanita's twenty-odd plays have been produced in the Bay Area, L.A. and NYC. In 2024, Juanita received a Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN Oakland.
