June Jordan



June Millicent Jordan (July 9, 1936 - June 14, 2002) was a Caribbean American poet, novelist, journalist, biographer, dramatist, teacher and committed activist. Jordan played an important role in the development of black artistic, social, and politic movements and is still widely regarded as one of the most significant and prolific black, bisexual writers of the 20th century.

Early life/marriage
June Jordan was born the only child of Jamaican immigrant parents, Granville Ivanhoe and Mildred Maud Jordan in Harlem, New York. Her father worked as a postal worker and her mother as a part time nurse. When Jordan was five, the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. While life in the Jordan household was often turbulent, Jordan credits her father with passing on to her a love of literature, and she began writing her own poetry at the age of seven. Jordan describes the complexities of her early childhood in her 2000 memoir, Soldier: A Poet's Childhood which she dedicated to her father.

In this short memoir Jordan explores her complicated relationship with a man who encouraged her to read broadly and memorize passages of classical texts, but would also beat her for the slightest misstep and called her "damn black devil child". In her 1986 essay For My American Family Jordan explores the many conflicts to be dealt with in the experience of being raised by black immigrant parents with visions of the future for their offspring that far exceeded the urban ghettos of the present.

In Soldier: A Poet's Childhood, Jordan recalls her father telling her "There was a war on against colored people, I had to became a soldier". While grateful to America for allowing him to escape poverty and seek a better life for his family, Jordan's father was conscious of the struggles his daughter would face and encouraged her to fight. After attending Brooklyn's Midwood high school for a year, Jordan enrolled in Northfield Mount Hermon School, an elite preparatory school in New England.

Through her education Jordan became "completely immersed in a white universe" attending predominately white schools, but was also able to construct and develop her identity as a black American and a writer. In 1953 Jordan, graduated high school and enrolled at Barnard College. Jordan later expressed how she felt about Barnard College in her book Civil War, she wrote, "No one ever presented me with a single Black author, poet, historian, personage, or idea for that matter. Nor was I ever assigned a single woman to study as a thinker, or writer, or poet, or life force. Nothing that I learned, here, lessened my feeling of pain or confusion and bitterness as related to my origins: my street, my family, my friends. Nothing showed me how I might try to alter the political and economic realities underlying our Black condition in white America."

It was at Barnard that she met a white Columbia University student, Michael Meyer whom she married in 1955. Jordan subsequently followed her husband to the University of Chicago, where he would pursue graduate studies in anthropology. She also enrolled at the university but soon returned to Barnard where she remained until 1957. In 1958 Jordan gave birth to the couples only child, Christopher David Meyer. The couple divorced in 1965.

Career
Jordan's first published book, Who Look at Me, appeared in 1969, was a collection of poems for children. Twenty-seven 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 (Copper Canyon Press, 2005) and a re-issue of the 1970 poetry collection, SoulScript, edited by Jordan.

In her memoir Soldier: A Poet's Childhood, Jordan depicted in detail her relationship with her father in the book and was happy with the outcome stating, "I wanted to honor my father, first of all, and secondly, I wanted people to pay attention to a little girl who is gifted intellectually and creative, and to see that there's a complexity here that we may otherwise not be prepared to acknowledge or even search for, let alone encourage, and to understand that this is an okay story. This is a story, I think, with a happy outcome, you know". 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. When asked about the writing process of I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky Jordan states, "The composer, John [Adams], said he needed to have the whole libretto before he could begin, so I just sat down last spring and wrote it in six weeks I mean, that's all I did. I didn't do laundry, anything.  I put myself into it 100 percent.  What I gave to John and Peter [Sellars] is basically what Scribner's has published now."

Jordan's teaching career began in 1967 at the City College of New York. Between 1968 and 1978 Jordan taught at Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Connecticut College. Jordan then became the director of The Poetry Center and was an English professor at SUNY at Stony Brook from 1978 to 1989. From 1989 to 2002 Jordan was a full professor in the departments of English, Women Studies, and African American Studies at the University of California Berkeley. At Berkeley Jordan founded Poetry for the People in 1991. The program inspires and empowers students to use poetry as a means of artistic expression.

On how she began with the concept of the program Jordan states,"I did not wake up one morning ablaze with a coherent vision of Poetry for the People! The natural intermingling of my ideas and my observations as an educator, a poet, and the African-American daughter of poorly documented immigrants did not lead me to any limiting ideological perspectives or resolve. Poetry for the People is the arduous and happy outcome of practical, day-by-day, classroom failure and success". Jordan composed three guideline points that embodied the program which was published with a set of her students writings in 1995 titled June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint.

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, or JJSE (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 Ella Baker.

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.

Writing

 * "In political journalism that cuts like razors in essays that blast the darkness of confusion with relentless light; in poetry that looks as closely into lilac buds as into death's mouth...she has comforted, explained, described, wrestled with, taught and made us laugh out loud before we wept...I am talking about a span of forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art." -Toni Morrison


 * "Whatever her theme or mode, June Jordan continually delineates the conditions of survival- of the body, and mind, and the heart" -Adrienne Rich


 * "Jordan makes us think of Akhmatova, of Neruda. She is among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all of us. She is the universal poet." -Alice Walker

Quotations

 * "We are the ones we have been waiting for." ("Poem for South African Women", Passion: New Poems (1977-1980); publ. Boston: Beacon Press, 1980). (Alice Walker used this line as the title of a book of essays, Barack Obama used the line frequently in his 2008 U.S. presidential campaign)


 * "We need, each of us, to begin the awesome, difficult work of love: loving ourselves so that we become able to love others without fear so that we can become able enough to enlarge the circle of our trust and our common striving for a safe, sunny afternoon near to flowering trees and under a very blue sky." ("A Powerful Hatred",Affirmative Acts: Political Essays; publ. NY, NY: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1998)


 * "Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn’t that what freedom implies?"


 * "If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable. To my mind, that is 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 would say, I hope so. But also, I do not believe that who you are guarantees anything important about what you choose to mean in the context of others’ lives...."

Recognition
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.

Publications

 * Who Look at Me, Crowell, 1969
 * Soulscript (editor)
 * The Voice of the Children, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970 (co-editor)
 * Some Changes, Dutton, 1971
 * Feminist Press, 2010, ISBN 9781558616585
 * Dry Victories, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972, ISBN 9780030860232
 * Fannie Lou Hamer, Crowell, 1972, ISBN 9780690288933
 * New Days, Emerson Hall, 1974, ISBN 9780878290550
 * New Life, Crowell, 1975, ISBN 9780690002119
 * Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poems, 1954–1977, Random House, 1977, ISBN 9780394409375
 * Passion, Beacon Press, 1980, ISBN 9780807032183
 * Kimako's Story, Houghton Mifflin, 1981, ISBN 9780395316047
 * Civil Wars, Beacon Press, 1981, ISBN 9780807032329;
 * Living Room, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1985, ISBN 9780938410263
 * On Call, South End Press, 1985, ISBN 9780896082687
 * Lyrical Campaigns, Virago, 1989, ISBN 9781853810428
 * Moving Towards Home, Virago, 1989, ISBN 9781853810435
 * Naming Our Destiny, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1989, ISBN 9780938410843
 * Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union, Pantheon Books, 1992, ISBN 9780679406259
 * Technical Difficulties: New Political Essays
 * Haruko: Love Poems, High Risk Books, 1994, ISBN 9781852423230
 * I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, Scribner, 1995
 * Kissing God Goodbye, Anchor Books, 1997, ISBN 9780385490320
 * Affirmative Acts, Anchor Books, 1998, ISBN	9780385492256
 * (editor, reprint)
 * Directed by Desire: The Complete Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2005) (edited by Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles), ISBN 9781556592287
 * (editor, reprint)
 * Directed by Desire: The Complete Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2005) (edited by Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles), ISBN 9781556592287
 * Directed by Desire: The Complete Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2005) (edited by Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles), ISBN 9781556592287