Judy Juanita, a poet, novelist, and playwright, was the editor-in-chief of The Black Panther, the newspaper of the Black Panther Party, while an undergrad at SF State. Juanita has long chronicled this country’s contradictions in various genres and has come out on the side of hope. In Virgin Soul, her debut, semiautobiographical novel, a young woman joins the Black Panther Party, meets many members of the Black Power movement (Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale), and critiques the movement from a feminist perspective. In De Facto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland, an essay collection, Juanita recalls a “goody-goody” childhood in 1950s America, “a Jell-O white bread land of perfection and gleaming surfaces,” and joining the Black Panthers. Her book, Homage to the Black Arts Movement, a multigenre work, considers the revolutionary Black artistic and political movements of the ’60s and ’70s, a literary group whose influence still impacts American culture. She appears also in the 2020 Netflix documentary, Last Chance U: Season 5, LANEY College, where she has taught writing since 1993