Meet the Authors: Judy Juanita & Benjamin Bowser

Join authors Judy Juanita and Benjamin Bowser for an evening of readings and discussion exploring Black life in Oakland. 

Judy Juanita's California Fever Dream: A Memoir chronicles Juanita's 60 years in literature and activism. 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. She recollects an arduous path to develop her fiction, poetry, and essays after that. Her family's move to Oakland from Oklahoma during the Great Migration undergirds her development. Juanita's latest book, a pro-choice look at abortion in four genres, is titled Abortion: or Woman as Threefold Murderess. 

Dr. Bowser’s When Black People Lived in Oakland looks at the African American presence in Oakland across three periods. First was when Oakland became an industrial jewel (1890-1940) with Black residents working as personal service workers living surprisingly throughout Oakland but unable to own homes outside of West Oakland, nor work in Oakland’s emerging manufacturing and agricultural economies. Second was during Oakland's precipitous decline (1950-2000) when Black working-class residents were able to move out of West Oakland into East and North Oakland housing left behind by Whites fleeing to the new suburbs. A short-lived struggle for Black control of Oakland's municipal government followed by Black unemployment and drug crises led to a reversal of Oakland’s Black population growth and political capital during this period. The third period (2001-present) examines Oakland during its re-emergence as part of a global hi-tech economy, with Black Oaklanders pushed to the outer suburbs of Antioch, Tracy, Stockton, and Fresno as distant service-worker communities.

About the authors:

Novelist, poet, dramatist, and essayist Judy Juanita’s poetry collection, Manhattan my ass, you’re in Oakland, earned the American Book Award in 2021. Her plays have been produced in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York City; her poetry and fiction are published widely. Born in Berkeley, raised in Oakland, she attended San Francisco State. While a junior at SF State, she served as editor-in-chief of the Black Panther, the newspaper of the Black Panther Party. Virgin Soul, her semi-autobiographical novel is about a young student becoming gradually radicalized and joining the Black Panther Party in the 1960s. Her writing is archived at Duke University in The John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies, alongside the archives of student activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Her full-length play "Theodicy" was a prizewinner in the Eileen Heckart Senior Play Competition in 2008. A collection of essays, DeFacto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland [EquiDistance, 2016], examines race, gender, politics and spirituality, as experienced by a black activist and self-described “feminist foot soldier.” 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 [UWA] in 2022.

Benjamin P. Bowser is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Social Services at CSU East Bay and a former Outstanding Professor, department chair, and dean of the college. He was a visiting professor at the University of Paris VI. His work focuses on urban studies, race relations, public health, and research methods. He is the author or editor of a dozen books including: The Black Middle Class: Social Mobility and Vulnerability; Against the Odds: Scholars Who Challenged Racism in the Twentieth Century; Impacts of Racism on White Americans; and Gangster Rap and Its Social Cost: Exploiting Hip Hop and Using Racial Stereotypes to Entertain America. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles. He is board chair of Oakland’s Cal-Pep (street outreach) and on the board of The Felton Institute, formerly on the Oakland Workforce Investment Board and the (S.F.) Glide Foundation. Dr. Bowser is from New York’s Harlem.