Best known for How I Became Hettie Jones, her memoir of the beat scene of the 1950s and ’60s, Hettie Jones is the author of twenty-three books for children and adults. Since 1979 she has taught writing at various universities, currently on the faculties of the New School’s Creative Writing (MFA) program and the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center. Jones is a former chair of the PEN Prison Writing Committee, and from 1989-2002 conducted a writing workshop at New York State’s Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, from which she published the nationally distributed Aliens at the Border.