J. J. Phillips

Jane J. Phillips (born April 2, 1944), known as J. J. Phillips, Her best known work is the novel Mojo Hand, first published in 1966, the story of a light-skinned upper-class young woman from San Francisco, California, who after hearing a record by bluesman Blacksnake Brown seeks him out and becomes embroiled in an ultimately tragic relationship with him.

Biography J. J. Phillips grew up in Los Angeles, California, in a progressive African-American family; her mother was a school teacher for 60 years, her father was Pasadena's first African-American attorney and real-estate developer. Phillips has said: "My immediate family was assimilated, atheist, and were for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from Caucasians in visage and speech." After reading The Country Blues by Samuel Charters, she listened to the music of Lightnin' Hopkins and determined to meet him, going with a roommate to Houston, Texas, to hear him play. She was expelled from Immaculate Heart College in January 1963, and has recalled: "I was extremely distraught. I wanted to be in school, but clearly the nuns didn't want me there. And soon after that I cam up with the idea to write a book that combined my fascination with Lightnin' with my abiding interest in herpetology, especially the blacksnake, which became the first name of the blues singer in Mojo Hand." An extract from Mojo Hand was included in Margaret Busby's anthology Daughters of Africa, published in the 1990s. In 2015, the novel was described by Nat Hentoff as the "most neglected book I know of". In a New York Times retrospective in 2024, Sadie Stein called Mojo Hand a "genre-defying, wildly idiosyncratic, astounding novel":

Influences Phillips was interviewed by Alan Govenar for his 2010 book Lightnin' Hopkins: His Life and Blues, in which he discusses the fallacy that Mojo Hand is "thinly disguised autobiography" based on her affair with Lightnin' Hopkins. In speaking about the origins of Mojo Hand, and setting out to tell "a story of one person's journey from a non-racialized state to the racialized real world", as was happening to her, Phillips said:"I realized that the perfect vehicle for effecting this was my own bluesy Orphic quest, which I developed after I had seen Marcel Camus's classic film Black Orpheus several times, and which led me to Lightnin'. The movie is a version of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice set in the black favelas of Rio during Mardi Gras. Classical mythology and herpetology were two things I'd been keenly interested in for as long as I can remember. In addition, I'd come under the influence of the existentialists and outlaw writers, such as Henry Miller, Genet, Sartre, as well as Richard Wright, and I was irresistibly drawn to the idea of the anti-hero and the bad boy in literature and life." rough-sorting the papers of Richard Brautigan — which the library had acquired after his suicide — only to realize that she was handling the actual pages on which Brautigan had blown out his brains.

Family papers J. J. Phillips' papers are held at Emory University.

Awards 2008 American Book Award, Lifetime Achievement

Works Revised as Mojo Hand: An Orphic Tale (City Miner Books, 1985; Serpent's Tail, 1987).

Poems

"Nigga in the Woodpile", in KONCH, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 32–34 (Spring, 1990). Revised and published online in Konch (2008). Corrected and republished with an accompanying essay as Nigga in the Woodpile: A Rant (Serendipity Books, 2008). "Lines Gleaned from the ŠÀ.ZI.GA", Exquisite Corpse. "Three Poems to the Eternal Beloved", Exquisite Corpse. "Throat Song: A Threnody for Ibrahim Qashoush", Exquisite Corpse.

Other Co-edited The Before Columbus Foundation Poetry Anthology: Selections from the American Book Awards, 1980-1990 (W. W. Norton & Company, 1992). .