- June Jordan
June Jordan (
July 9 1936 -June 14 2002 ) was anJamaican American political activist ,writer ,poet , andteacher .Early life/marriage
June Jordan was born in
Harlem toJamaica n 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 toBedford-Stuyvesant . In 1953, Jordan enrolled atBarnard College . There she met aColumbia 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 byPeter Sellars .Jordan's teaching career began in 1967 at the
City College of New York . She foundedPoetry for the People at theUniversity of California, Berkeley . She was a full professor in the departments of English, Women Studies, andAfrican American Studies. She also taught atYale University .Honors/awards
Jordan received numerous honors and awards, including a 1969-1970 Rockefeller grant for creative writing, a
Yaddo Fellowship in 1979, aNational Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1982, and the Achievement Award for International Reporting from theNational 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 fromThe 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). [ [http://www.csufresno.edu/peacegarden/nominees/jordan.htm June Jordan ] ]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 inBerkeley, 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 overPhilip Vera Cruz andCesar 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 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?" [ [http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/gaybears/jordan Gay Bears: June Jordan ] ]
*"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." [ [http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/gaybears/jordan Gay Bears: June Jordan ] ]
*"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...." [ [http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/gaybears/jordan Gay Bears: June Jordan ] ]
*"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 had 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 have been waiting for." [ [http://junejordan.com/byjune.html "Poem for South African Women"] ] (
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)References
External links
* [http://books.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,11617,740747,00.html] Obituary in "The Guardian" (UK) by Margaret Busby,
20 June 2002 .
* [http://www.junejordan.com/] June Jordan Official Website
* [http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cssn/cssn-list/2002/06/00043.html] Obituary
* [http://www.kqed.org/w/baywindow/speakingfreely/remarkable/june_jordan.html] Audio Interview with Jordan
* [http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/jordan.html] PBS New York Writers Link]
* [http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:RAD.SCHL:sch00345 June Jordan Papers.] [http://www.radcliffe.edu/schles Schlesinger Library,] Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.