June Jordan

Jordan’s life: June Jordan was born in Harlem in 1936, the daughter of West Indian immigrant parents. As she recounts in her 1999 memoir, Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood, she passed her childhood years amid violence of many kinds. She began writing poetry very young, left home to attend a girls’ school in New England, attended Barnard College, was briefly married to a white man, had one son and a long & illustrious university teaching career. She died of breast cancer in Berkeley, California in 2002.

Jordan as poet: Jordan’s poems are direct, often angry but always eloquent & literary, crafted at the intersection of personal detail & political struggle. She often said that writing poetry was inevitably a political act, and many of her poems explicitly embody struggles against racism & sexism and towards liberation, evidenced in titles like “Song for Soweto,” “Freedom Now Suite,” and “Poem To Take Back the Night.”

Jordan as political activist: In an interview on KQED public television, Jordan attributed her political passion & feistiness to her father’s having taught her to fight as a young girl: “Well, my father taught me how to box, and I think that was maybe the most important thing I ever learned. I try to affect the way people think about things.... And I also try to get people mad, you know, basically punch people in the nose sort of thing, and or pull ’em along as much as I can politically.”

Jordan as teacher: June Jordan began her teaching career at City College of New York & held teaching positions at Yale, Sarah Lawrence & SUNY Stonybrook before she moved to California in 1989 to take a position at UC Berkeley. There she re-energized the teaching of poetry in founding Poetry for the People, a program intended to bring poetry reading & writing to life for students from all cultures & disciplines, to foster students’ passion for poetry and so inspire & empower them to go out & teach others.