June Jordan

June Jordan
June Jordan
Born	(1936-07-09)July 9, 1936 Harlem, New York United States
Died	Berkeley, California, United States
Occupation	writer
Nationality	United States
Alma mater	Barnard College
Period	1969–2002
Genre	African American literature, LGBT literature
Subject	Civil rights, Feminism, Bisexual/LGBT rights movement
Spouse	Michael Meyer (married 1955, divorced 1965)
Children	Christopher David Meyer
Website
www.junejordan.com

June Millicent Jordan (July 9, 1936 – June 14, 2002) was a Caribbean-American poet and activist.

Early life

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 for the USPS and her mother as a part-time nurse. When Jordan was five, the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, New York. 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. Throughout her education Jordan became "completely immersed in a white universe" by 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 from high school and enrolled at Barnard College. Jordan later expressed how she felt about Barnard College in her book Civil Wars, writing: "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."

Personal

At Barnard Jordan met 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 couple's only child, Christopher David Meyer. The couple divorced in 1965.

Jordan self-identified as bisexual in her writing

Career

Jordan's first published book, Who Look at Me (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 (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 stated: "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 she 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 she was a full professor in the departments of English, Women Studies, and African American Studies at the University of California Berkeley.

Jordan was known as "the Poet of the People", and at Berkeley, she founded the "Poetry for the People" program in 1991. Its aim was to inspire and empower students to use poetry as a means of artistic expression. Reflecting on how she began with the concept of the program Jordan said: "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, entitled June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint.

Death and legacy

Jordan died of breast cancer at her home in Berkeley, California, aged 65. 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.

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. 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.

Honors and awards

Jordan received numerous honors and awards, including a 1969-70 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. She 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).

In 2005, Directed by Desire: Collected Poems, a posthumous collection of her work, had to compete (and won) in the category "Lesbian Poetry" at the Lambda Literary Awards, even though Jordan identified as bisexual. However, BiNet USA led the bisexual community in a multi-year campaign eventually resulting in the addition of a Bisexual category, starting with the 2006 Awards.

Reception

Author Toni Morrison commented: "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... [Jordan] 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." Poet Adrienne Rich noted: "whatever her theme or mode, June Jordan continually delineates the conditions of survival- of the body, and mind, and the heart". Alice Walker stated: "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." Thulani Davis wrote: "In a borough that has landmarks for the writers Thomas Wolfe, W. H. Auden, and Henry Miller, to name just three, there ought to be a street in Bed-Stuy called June Jordan Place, and maybe a plaque reading, 'A Poet and Soldier for Humanity Was Born Here.'"

Bibliography

• Who Look at Me, Crowell, 1969, OCLC 22828
• Soulscript (editor), Doubleday, 1970, OCLC 492067711
• The Voice of the Children, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970 (co-editor), OCLC 109494
• Some Changes, Dutton, 1971, OCLC 133482
• ; Feminist Press, 2010, ISBN 978-1-55861-658-5
• Dry Victories, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972, ISBN 978-0-03-086023-2
• Fannie Lou Hamer, Crowell, 1972, ISBN 978-0-690-28893-3
• New Days, Emerson Hall, 1974, ISBN 978-0-87829-055-0
• New Life, Crowell, 1975, ISBN 978-0-690-00211-9
• Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poems, 1954–1977, Random House, 1977, ISBN 978-0-394-40937-5
• Passion, Beacon Press, 1980, ISBN 978-0-8070-3218-3
• Kimako's Story, Houghton Mifflin, 1981, ISBN 978-0-395-31604-7
• Civil Wars, Beacon Press, 1981, ISBN 978-0-8070-3232-9;
• Living Room, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1985, ISBN 978-0-938410-26-3
• On Call, South End Press, 1985, ISBN 978-0-89608-268-7
• Lyrical Campaigns, Virago, 1989, ISBN 978-1-85381-042-8
• Moving Towards Home, Virago, 1989, ISBN 978-1-85381-043-5
• Naming Our Destiny, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1989, ISBN 978-0-938410-84-3
• Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union, Pantheon Books, 1992, ISBN 978-0-679-40625-9
• Technical Difficulties: New Political Essays
• Haruko: Love Poems, High Risk Books, 1994, ISBN 978-1-85242-323-0
• I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, Scribner, 1995
• Kissing God Goodbye, Anchor Books, 1997, ISBN 978-0-385-49032-0
• 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 978-1-55659-228-7

External links

• June Jordan Official Website
• Profile at the Poetry Foundation
• June Jordan Papers, 1936-2002. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
• Audio collection of June Jordan, 1970-2000. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
• Jordan, June, 1936-2002. Videotape collection of June Jordan, 1976-2002. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
• Audio Interview with Jordan
• PBS New York Writers Link
• Obituary, The Guardian (UK) by Margaret Busby, 20 June 2002
• Columbia University Obituary
• Faith Cheltnam, Bisexuals Worthy of Celebration During Black History Month: June Jordan Huffington Post (USA), February 24, 2013