Her Writing
Influenced by:
James Baldwin, Carolyn Forche, Susan Griffin, Linda Hogan and W.S. Merwin.
“Mississippi Goddam”: Traveling Back
This story, about searching for her father-in-law’s family, won the Solas Award for Best Family Travel Writing
Easter Sunday, 1986, a bright, warm Denver day. The kids and I crossed St. Paul Street to get Grandpa Bryson from the nursing home. Sol had been living there since January when my ex-husband, Pete, brought his father from Puerto Rico, after his mother, Babe, died there of a sudden heart attack.
Your Verdict: A Judge’s Reckoning with Law and Loss: a Memoir of Race, Law, Family, and Poetry
SNEAK PREVIEW from Your Verdict: A Judge’s Reckoning with Law and Loss
A journalist once asked me how I’ve managed to overcome so much in my life. The question stunned me. It had never occurred to me that I had overcome anything. I was just living my life. What she was referring to, of course, was that, compared with many judges, my life has been unconventional. A working class background. Interracial marriage. Welfare mother, Feminist. Community activist. Bi-sexuality. Poetry. What bothers me about the question is the idea of overcoming something, as if I had to conquer my own life, when this life I’ve been making has also been making me. I am a part of so many of the extraordinary, ordinary events and people in court. People like myself, who try to face life and need a little help doing so.
The Home Visit
Flash Fiction: "The Home Visit" published by The Ravens Perch
What you feel here is how it happened there. The grown son was in the garage tinkering with a car. He pretended not to notice me.
Mississippi Goddam
"Mississippi Goddam" was published in Valley Voices, a literary review of the HBCU, Mississippi Valley State University, in its special issue “A Sense of Place,” Spring 2022.
In Spring 1927, when Sol Bryson was seventeen, the sky opened up, thunder cracked and the rains poured all the water from heaven into the Ohio River, the Allegheny, the Wabash, the Tennessee, all the tributaries that emptied into the Mississippi as it ran narrow in the Delta, and mud channels pushed back, creating one moving monster of water and all that it carried with it—houses and trees, bodies and parts of all those things and more. Sol heard the cries and saw the red mud rising like the terror inside him. The water was rising so fast that their cotton field was becoming just a spit of land surrounded by water, a long finger pointing east. They all ran from it, they had to.
Summer of Love
This memoir excerpt will be published in full in the Northern Colorado Writers Anthology, Spring 2023, a collection dedicated to the theme of “Exception/All: An Exploration of Normal"
In June 1967 Pete learned he had been selected for a summer job in California with the Student Health Project, a federal anti-poverty program. He asked and I said yes and watched him move into action. Pete was the great planner, the great provider, controller, idea man, with notes on index cards in his pocket and boxes of loose change on the dashboard. We had to get to California soon. But where to get married? The District, where I lived, had a waiting period for blood testing; Virginia, where Pete lived, prohibited interracial marriage. The laws of slavery had written that one-part Negro blood meant you were the master's property, and Jim Crow titrated blood along similar lines.
A Tour of East Colfax Avenue, Denver, Colorado, circa 1974
The New York Quarterly in 2022.
I wrote this poem in response to a prompt given by poet Carolyn Forche in a Lighthouse Writers workshop focused on the poetry of witness.
To wander East Colfax Avenue in the 1970s is to be young, female, angry and ripe, a June tomato planted early, reddens on the vine, splits open and bleeds. It runs down your leg and stains the street. You don’t stop, you don’t wipe, you let it remain, to remind us of the disappeared women, to remember Joan Little, the inmate who refused the guard in the prison kitchen with an ice pick.
If It’s True, It Must Also Be Beautiful
Nominated for Best of the Net 2020
The look he’s giving Nancy says to me it’s more than land he craves. And not just her beauty, he told me in private, but it’s something else in her that he needs. “Not the way a drunk needs a drink, Father,” he explained, “or the way a child needs a mother, more like a sinner needs a priest.”
My Sisters Made of Light
Colorado Book Award-Literary Fiction, Finalist
My Sisters Made of Light follows three generations of a Pakistani family as they make their way through life in the political, social, and religious maze that is their motherland.
This novel pulls readers into the compelling, heartbreaking, and often terrifying world of honor crimes against women in Pakistan through the life and family history of Ujala.
Ujala decides to follow the path for which her mother has prepared her and pushes aside fears for her own safety to help other women escape from the impossible situations in which they find themselves.
Dorothy Allison, author of the critically acclaimed Bastard Out of Carolina, says, "[Jacqueline St.
Joan] brings to her story what she brought to the law, a conviction that life is full of both struggle and purpose and that grace comes to us when we have no reason to expect it.
Ten Ways of Looking at the West
Sage Green Journal (http://sagegreenjournal.org/jacqueline-st.-joan.html)
I
I drive the canyons of the West
Deliberately,
The way I drag my finger between
The shoulder blades of the cat.
A Mother's Advice to her Children
Third Place, The Colorado Lawyer Poetry Contest, 2006.
If you ever get the chance, live with an artist.
Live with an artist and you begin to notice
the shapes of things.
Even the air around the enormous
sprig of forsythia
in the beer bottle,
the way its presence
makes the room fade away,
its relationship with the white wall,
its simple canvas.
Restraining Order
First Place, The Colorado Lawyer Poetry Contest, 2006.
I am watching the freckles
on the back of my fingers
multiply and divide like
lovers under the lens. The
speaker at my podium
says: He's my pimp. Tore
a branch from a tree. Beat
me. The branch broke.
White Rain
Honorable Mention, The Colorado Lawyer Poetry Contest, 2006.
Although it is summer evening,
hair spray and Nescafé
smell so strong and familiar
it makes one wonder if it is morning or night.
In the tiny yellow bathroom,
Life in Two seasons: Love Here, Love Gone
From Empire Magazine, The Denver Post
It is a world of birds here in the morning. Busy magpies with sticks. Occasional duck couples settle into the lake. A thousand starlings fill the empty branches of an enormous poplar. When I look up at the tree again, and the black birds have all departed without a sound, without a trace. I am stunned. I grieved the whole year my last child left home. When I dream at the change of seasons, it is often about them as little children, as they were then, sleek and wild, our life full of surprise and struggle. In the dreams we are together again, as if they arrive and depart from me regularly due to the energy and excitement of the equinoxes. All the seasons of my life circle around and I can be all ages.
Meeting the Dalai Lama in Tibet
Winner of the Silver Solas Women's Travel Writing Award, 2009
The best account by a woman of an encounter or experience on the road.
My first impression of Lhasa is the ubiquitous, identical white-tiled buildings that the Chinese government builds to line the streets, hiding even the grand Potala Palace from our view. Our hotel, although modest, feels like a palace to me. The entrance is beautifully flowered and we have our first sit-down toilet.
a beautiful thing
Published in Mountain Talking, Fall, 2016 and Sage Green Journal
It is a beautiful thing to wake
in the dark chill of October
and go out into it
where a crescent moon
and two stars appear both ahead
Letter to Muriel Rukeyser at the End of the Twentieth Century
Denver Press Club Poetry Award
Your poems shock
the way waterlilies burning in a museum
shock the moneyed. With fragrant treason you begged even the rich,
to understand, As you spoke to each generation as that generation,
your dark hair curled in the thirties
by a passion electric for justice.
What Zero Looks Like
First Place, Lyrical Poetry, Columbine Poets of Colorado, 2015
He says, What’s the biggest number?
What’s out there, after atmosphere and space?
We are driving home from preschool.
There is no biggest number, I say.
There is always one more.
Re-stitching The Sky
Turkey Buzzard Press
Vees of geese are sewing Denver back into its morning,
where telescopic, multifaceted periscopes
take in the entire dance & climb.
To the west, snow- peaked triangles; downtown,
rectangles of finance & domes of government;
under the interstate, warehouses of industry &
puffs of cottonwood along the river.
Cough Drop Joe
This “family fiction,” won the 2019 Black Sheep Award of the Colorado Genealogical Society
In those days I’d take the train from Union Station in Denver, my home town, to Union Station in Washington, D.C., where the reporting work was. It took a couple of days, but it gave me time to do some writing in the dining car that had a quiet bartender, and to watch the country roll by. There were hobo camps along the rails--you could tell by the smoke. I could take a close up look at them and then roll on by, settle back, open a book or pick up a pen.