Cortez, Jane

CORTEZ, JANE (1936-2012). African-American surrealist poet, civil rights activist, and Bola Press publisher, Cortez was born Sallie Jayne Richards, on an Army base in Arizona. She spent her youth in Southern California, where she became interested in the arts. She attended Compton Community College but did not graduate. She took the surname of her maternal grandmother. At the age of 18, she married the jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman (their son, Denardo Coleman, became a jazz drummer and collaborated with both his parents). She divorced Coleman in 1964 and founded the Watts Repertory Theater, for which she served as artistic director until 1970.

Meanwhile, Cortez threw herself into political activity. Going South, she worked with Fannie Lou Hamer and SNCC’s black voter registration, urging the use of art in political organizing. After further extensive travels, she moved to New York and in 1969 published her first book of poetry, Pisstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares. Cortez went on to publish eleven books of poems, mostly through her own Bola Press. In 1975, she married surrealist sculptor and print-maker Melvin Edwards.

From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, she taught at Rutgers University in the English department. She also traveled widely, presenting her poetry and her ideas across the Americas to Europe and beyond. Her work was widely translated, and she recorded poetry with jazz in her own band, the Firespitters. Later, she lived with Mel Edwards in Ghana and co-founded, with Ghanaian wrier Ama Ata, the Organization of Women Writers of Ghana (OWWA). Along with Edwards, she maintained a second home in Dakar, Senegal, until her death. She was the winner of an American Book Award and after her passing, had an issue of Black Scholar dedicated to her life and her work.

Cortez’s influence on understanding the role of women of color as artists around the world was highlighted by a global conference she organized in 1998. She had also devoted much of her work to artistic opposition to war and military spending. Her own example and influence in the political use of Spoken Word poetry has been likened to Judith Malina’s role in radical theater.

Introduced to the Surrealist Movement in New York in 1978 by Ted Joans, the Beat poet, advocate for Black Power and friend of André Breton, she was also a close friend of the visionary Caribbean surrealist Léon Gontran Damas. She served as co-editor of the surrealist collection Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination.

Memorial tributes to her life and work were organized in New York and London, with speakers at Cooper Union ranging from Danny Glover to Amiri Baraka, Genna Rae McNeil and Quincy Troupe. Historian Robin D.G. Kelley concluded: “Cortez after all was and first and foremost is an activist.”

Special Issue. Black Scholar, 43(Spring 2013).

Buhle, Paul and Jane Cortez, Philip Lamantia, Nancy Joyce Peters, Frankln Rosemont and Penelope Rosement, eds. Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination. San Francisco: City Lights. Books, 1982.

Rosemont, Penelope, ed. Surrealist Women: An International Anthology. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.