Your Verdict:  A Judge’s Memoir of Law and Loss 

In Your Verdict: A Judge’s Reckoning with Law and Loss, Jacqueline St. Joan recounts a life shaped by judgment—rendered, received, and endured—across the courtroom and the most intimate terrain of family. The book will be published in May 2026 by Golden Antelope Press.

The memoir opens with St. Joan on the bench in 1990s Denver, presiding over cases that place her at the center of bodily harm and public scrutiny…

  • As a judge in Denver in the 1990s, I was expected to be impartial, restrained, and above all, neutral. I became controversial—for my rulings in protest cases involving public figures and in domestic violence work.  Sometimes cases reflected issues from my personal life that fractured my own family when I crossed racial and sexual lines. Your Verdict: A Judge’s Memoir of Law and Loss is a literary memoir about what happens when justice is practiced as a form of love—and when love itself becomes grounds for judgment

    I spent years issuing verdicts—some that freed, some that confined, all that carried consequences I could not control once they left my hands. But the verdicts that marked me most were not rendered from the bench. They came quietly, from my own family, after I married across racial lines only a few days after the famous Loving vs. Virginia Supreme Court decision banned statutes prohibiting interracial marriage. I know how judgment is formed: by evidence, by bias, by fear, by love. I am not here to persuade you. I am here to tell you what I did, what it cost, and what it demanded of me. The law shaped my work. Love shaped my life. The verdict, now, is yours.

COMING SOON!

Law, Literature & Voices of Protest & Reconciliation

  • Her first novel, My Sisters Made of Light (Press 53) was a finalist for the 2010 Colorado Book Award in Literary Fiction, and was a book of the month selection for the American Association of University Women. Through sales and donations, she raised $25,000 for the creation of a shelter for women and children in Punjab, Pakistan.  The sequel novel, The Shawl of Midnight, also set inside the women’s movement in South Asia, was published by Golden Antelope Press in 2022. Her most recent short fiction is “Summer of Love,” memoir excerpt, Northern Colorado Writers Anthology, Spring 2023, and "Mississippi Goddam"Valley Voices, a literary review of the HBCU, Mississippi Valley State University .the online short story, “If It’s True, It Must Also Be Beautiful,” in The Missouri Review, which the editors have nominated for Best of the Net and flash fiction, "The Home Visit" The Ravens Perch June 2022. She won the Black Sheep award for her family fiction story, “Cough Drop Joe,” by the Colorado Genealogical Society.

  • Among her poetry awards: Denver Press Club, Colorado Council on the Arts fellowship; William Battrick Award in Poetry at University of Colorado; fellowship with Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute, and writer in residence at Wildacres, North Carolina.  Her poetry has been published in periodicals such as (most recently, New York Quarterly) Ms., The Denver Quarterly, SageGreen Journal, Montelibre and Colorado Women News. Until its closure in 2020, she was the News Poetry Editor for The Colorado Independent.

  • Her nonfiction ranges from memoir to op-eds to legal scholarship, book reviews, travel writing, and social justice essays and rants.  She recently reviewed the poetry anthology, The Four Faces of Eve, www.compulsivereader.com, “Dismantling White Supremacy:  The Importance of History and the Role of Neighbors,”www.renameforall.com, 2020, Thinking About How to Think About Renaming Stapleton, " www.renameforall.com, 2018.Several pieces have won awards, for example, “Meeting the Dalai Lama in Tibet,” Silver, Women’s Solas Travel Writing Award and the Rocky Mountain MLA Award for Best Feminist Essay. She has published in the Harvard Women's Law Journal, Empire Magazine, and others.

  • She co-edited the anthology, Beyond Portia: Women, Law & Literature in the U.S. (Northeastern UP) and her writings have appeared in numerous anthologies, such as The Quotable Woman, Tumblewords: Writers Reading the West;Disturbing the Peace:Writings by Colorado Attorneys, Chokecherries Anthology, Kaleidoscope: Lenses on Reality, The Legal Studies Forum, and Fungi Anthology, and Thinking Women:Introduction to Women's Studies, Poems from the Back Forty, Mycoepithalamia: Mushroom Wedding Poems.

Browse her writings by theme:

Women & The Law

Violence against women, feminism.

History & The West

The American West, cities & families.

Racial Justice

Racism, injustice

Dharma & South Asia

Buddhism, liminal spaces, spirituals.

Culture & Nature

Canada geese, gardens, summer.

Family & Children

Mothers, bravery & loss.

Her Books for Sale

About Jacqueline

Jacqueline St. Joan is an award-winning poet, memoirist, essayist, writer of fiction and feminist legal scholarship. Her writing intersects the fields of law and literature with the voices of contemporary protest and reconciliation. She writes about history and family fictions; the abuse of women and inheritance of racism; the minds of children, teaching and learning; law and justice and literature; South Asia, gardens, birds. She has a law degree and a Master’s in creative writing. A lifelong feminist, she is a retired lawyer and Colorado county judge, a lifelong social justice activist with a voice. Learn more about Jacqueline.