Everything about June Jordan totally explained
June Jordan (
July 9 1936 -
June 14 2002) was an
Jamaican American political activist,
writer,
poet, and
teacher.
Early life/marriage
June Jordan was born in
Harlem to
Jamaican immigrant parents. Her father, Granville, was a postal clerk, and her mother, Mildred, was a part-time nurse. When Jordan was five, the family moved to
Bedford-Stuyvesant. In
1953, Jordan enrolled at
Barnard College. There she met a
Columbia University student, Michael Meyer. They married in
1955, and had a son, Christopher. The couple divorced in
1966.
Career
Jordan's first published book,
Who Look at Me, appeared in
1969, was a collection of poems for children. 27 more books followed in her lifetime, one (Some of Us Did Not Die, Collected and New Essays) was in press when she died. Two more have been published posthumously:
Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (2005) and a re-issue of the 1970 poetry collection,
SoulScript, edited by Jordan.
Her autobiographical
Soldier: A Poet's Childhood came out in
2000. She was also an
essayist, columnist for
The Progressive, novelist, biographer, and librettist for the musical/opera
I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, composed by
John Adams and produced by
Peter Sellars.
Jordan's teaching career began in
1967 at the
City College of New York. She founded
Poetry for the People at the
University of California, Berkeley. She was a full professor in the departments of English, Women Studies, and
African American Studies. She also taught at
Yale University.
Honors/awards
Jordan received numerous honors and awards, including a 1969-1970 Rockefeller grant for creative writing, a
Yaddo Fellowship in 1979, a
National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in
1982, and the Achievement Award for International Reporting from the
National Association of Black Journalists in
1984. Jordan also won the
Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writers Award from 1995 to 1998 as well as the Ground Breakers-Dream Makers Award from
The Woman's Foundation in
1994.
She was included in
Who's Who in America from 1984 until her death. She received the Chancellor's Distinguished Lectureship from
UC Berkeley and the PEN Center USA West Freedom to Write Award (1991).
A conference room is also named after her in UC Berkeley's Eshleman Hall, which is used by the
Associated Students of the University of California.
Death
Jordan died of
breast cancer at her home in
Berkeley, California, aged 65. She was survived by her son, Christopher Meyer. The June Jordan School for Equity (formerly known as the Small School for Equity) in
San Francisco was named after her by the founding group of students who, through a democratic process of research, debate, and voting, chose her over
Philip Vera Cruz and
Cesar Chavez.
Shortly before her death, she completed
Some of Us Did Not Die, her seventh collection of political essays (and 27th book), which was published posthumously. In it she describes how her early marriage to a white student while at Barnard College immersed her in the racial turmoil of America in the
1950s, and set her on the path of social activism.
Quotations
- "Bisexuality means I'm free and I'm as likely to want to love a woman as I'm likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn’t that what freedom implies?"
"If you're free, you're not predictable and you're not controllable. To my mind, that's the keenly positive, politicizing significance of bisexual affirmation... to insist upon the equal validity of all the components of social/sexual complexity."
"Does our sexual or racial identity compel an activist intersection with such a horrifying status quo or not? Is it sexual or racial identity that will catapult each of us into creative agency for social change? I'd say, I hope so. But also, I don't believe that who you're guarantees anything important about what you choose to mean in the context of others’ lives...."
"When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different ... we laughed at them. We condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we'd made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives" ("Poem for South African Women", Passion: New Poems (1977-1980); publ. Boston: Beacon Press, 1980).
"We are the ones we've been waiting for." (Alice Walker used this line as the title of a book of essays.)
Bibliography
Who Look at Me
Soulscript (editor)
The Voice of the Children (co-editor)
Some Changes
His Own Where
Dry Victories
Fannie Lou Hamer
New Days
New Life
Things That I Do in the Dark
Passion
Kimako's Story
Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poems, 1954-1977
Civil Wars
Living Room
On Call
Lyrical Campaigns
Moving Towards Home
Naming Our Destiny
Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union
Technical Difficulties: New Political Essays
Haruko Love Poems
I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky
June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint
Civil Wars (new edition)
Kissing God Goodbye
Affirmative Acts
Soldier
Some of Us Did Not Die
Soulscript: A Collection of Classic African American Poetry (editor, reprint)
Directed by Desire: The Complete Poems of June Jordan (due out in Fall, 2005)Further Information
Get more info on 'June Jordan'.
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