Meet the Authors: Judy Juanita & Benjamin Bowser

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Lower level, Bradley C. Walters Community Room. 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…

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