June Jordan

June Jordan (July 9, 1936-June 14, 2002) was an African-American writer and teacher. She was openly bisexual. Her career as a poet and activist embodied the ideals of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 70s, during which she came of age.

Life

She was born in Harlem, New York, to Jamaican immigrants. Her father Granville Ivanhoe Jordan was a postal clerk on the night shift, and her mother Mildred worked as a nurse. When June was five years old, the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Jordan was the only black student in her high school.

Related Topics:
Harlem - Jamaica - Bedford-Stuyvesant - Brooklyn

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In 1953, Jordan enrolled at Barnard College. There she met a white Columbia University student, Michael Meyer. They married in 1955, and had a son, Christopher. The couple divorced in 1966.

Related Topics:
1953 - Barnard College - Columbia University - 1955 - 1966

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Jordan's first published book, Who Look at Me, appeared in 1969, 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, and at least one more has been published posthumously (a re-issue of the 1970 poetry collection "SoulScript", edited by Jordan). Publication of her complete poems is scheduled for Fall, 2005. Her autobiographical Soldier: A Poet's Childhood came out in 2000. Although best known as a poet, she was also an essayist, a regular columnist for The Progressive, a novelist, a biographer, and a librettist for the opera "I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky", composed by John Adams and produced by Peter Sellars.

Related Topics:
1969 - 2000 - Essayist - The Progressive

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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 where she was a full professor in the departments of English, Women Studies and African American Studies. In between, she taught at several other institutions of higher education, including Yale University.

Related Topics:
1967 - City College of New York - Poetry for the People - University of California, Berkeley - Yale University

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After battling the disease for a decade, Jordan died of breast cancer, at her home in Berkeley, California.

Related Topics:
Breast cancer - Berkeley, California

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There is now in San Francisco a school named after June Jordan, the June Jordan Small School for Equity.

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