Judy Juanita’s Virgin Soul, a novel (Viking, 2013), is based on her own experiences in the Black Panther Party in the 60s. Born in Berkeley and raised in Oakland, 16-year-old Judie Hart enrolled at Oakland City College where she first met fellow students Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. As a junior at San Francisco State, she joined the Black Student Union and met up with Huey and Bobby again. She joined and began working full-time for the Black Panther Party (BPP). When Eldridge Cleaver was jailed after the 1968 shootout in West Oakland, Huey appointed her editor-in-chief of the BPP Intercommunal News Service. She worked on the newspaper and the BPP Breakfast for Children program while finishing her BA at SF State. Virgin Soul: a handbook (EquiDistance Press, 2017) is the paperback edition of the novel. Juanita’s poetry and fiction have been published widely, and seventeen of her plays have been produced in the Bay Area and NYC. While living in New Jersey, Juanita was awarded New Jersey Arts Council Fellowships for poetry and worked as Poet-in-the-Schools. She received an MFA in creative writing from SFSU and has taught writing at Laney College in Oakland since 1993. Her collection of essays, De Facto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland (EquiDistance Press, 2016) looks at the gap between black and female empowerment. It was Book-of-the-Month for December, 2016, at African Americans on the Move Book Club (AAMBC), and garnered a starred review and Book-of-the-Month from Kirkus Reviews in March, 2017.