Novelist Jean Thompson said of Virgin Soul: "Hard to believe it's been almost fifty years since the formation of the Black Panthers. Judy Juanita's debut novel, Virgin Soul, chronicled a black female coming of age in the 60s who joins the Black Panther Party. In a starred review ("compelling and challenging collection"), Kirkus Reviews states: these "short stories set in Northern California and the New York metropolitan area raise plenty of questions without offering easy answers questions of belonging, equity, love, and responsibility." One of the stories titled "The Black House" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2022. Winner of the Tartt Fiction Prize at the University of West Alabama, her short story collection, The High Price of Freeways, was published by Livingston Press in 2022. Gawdzilla ends with "The Gun as Performance Poem," a long prose poem that was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2014 in it she traces her history with activism, beginning with joining the Black Panther Party (BPP) in the sixties and editing its newspaper. Her second poetry collection, Gawdzilla, (EquiDistance Press, 2022), examines race, marriage, family, abortion, and other massive social changes since 1954 when Godzilla, the horror movie, and the Supreme Court ruling on integration, Brown v. Her poem "Bling" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012. Judy Juanita's poetry collection, Manhattan my ass, you're in Oakland (EquiDistance Press, 2021), won the American Book Award 2021 from the Before Columbus Foundation.
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