Jayne Cortez

Sallie Jayne Richardson was born on the tenth of May 1934 at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, an Army post, and raised in the Watts district of Los Angeles, where Manual Arts High School and Compton College — left early for want of money — gave her what schooling the times allowed. In 1954 she married the saxophonist Ornette Coleman; their son Denardo, born in 1956, became the drummer of her life's music; the marriage ended in 1964.

In the Mississippi drives of 1963 and 1964 she worked in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's voter-registration campaigns alongside Fannie Lou Hamer; in 1964 she founded the Watts Repertory Theatre Company, remaining its artistic director until 1970, and in 1967 she moved to New York. Her first collection, Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man's Wares, appeared in 1969, and in 1971 she founded her own imprint, Bola Press — a poet who owned her means of publication.

Some twelve collections followed — Festivals and Funerals, Scarifications, Mouth on Paper, Firespitter, Coagulations, Jazz Fan Looks Back, On the Imperial Highway — and around 1980 she formed the Firespitters: Denardo Coleman on drums, Bern Nix on guitar, Al MacDowell on bass. Across some nine recordings her surreal, insistent poems rode the band's jazz — a spoken-word art that anticipated much and imitated nothing. In 1975 she married the sculptor Melvin Edwards.

In 1991, with Ama Ata Aidoo, she co-founded the Organization of Women Writers of Africa, whose Yari Yari conferences gathered Black women writers from across the world. She died at New York on the twenty-eighth of December 2012, of heart failure, at seventy-eight. Honored be Jayne Cortez, who spoke her poems until the horns answered.