Poet, activist, educator, and essayist June Jordan was born in Harlem, New York City, in 1936. An only child, she was raised by her parents, who immigrated from Jamaica and Panama, in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Influenced by her father’s enthusiasm for literature, she began writing poetry at only seven years old. Jordan attended high school at the majority-white Northfield School for Girls in Massachusetts and university at Barnard College, the latter of which she left without a final degree due to her alienation from the strictly white and male literary curriculum there. She married and later divorced Columbia student Michael Meyer, with whom she had one child. Despite anti-LGTBQ+ stigma at the time, Jordan’s writing openly acknowledged her bisexuality.
Jordan’s first publication, in 1969, was a collection of children’s poetry. Over the course of her career, she published 28 books—including essay collections, libretti, and children’s books as well as volumes of poetry—followed by further posthumous works. Her young adult novel His Own Where was a finalist for the National Book Award. She was a contributing editor to American Poetry Review, and her writing appeared in periodicals ranging from the New York Times and the New Republic to Ms. and Vibe. Her poems are included in a vast array of anthologies of contemporary poetry. She collaborated with figures such as John Adams, Peter Sellars, and Buckminster Fuller.
Jordan was also a lifelong activist who fought fiercely for civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and anti-war causes. She taught at CUNY’s City College, Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Connecticut College, always pushing for the inclusion of marginalized work in curricula. After a ten-year stint at SUNY Stony Brook, where she was director of the Poetry Center, she was appointed professor of English, women’s studies, and African-American studies at the University of California, Berkeley. There, she co-founded Poetry for the People, a program meant to encourage students to read poetry and write it themselves.
Jordan’s many accolades include fellowships, grants, and residencies from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, and other institutions. She won the Chancellor's Distinguished Lectureship from the University of California at Berkeley, the PEN Center USA West Freedom to Write Award, the Achievement Award for International Reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists, and the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writers Award, as well as a special recognition from the United States Congress. In 2019, she was one of fifty inaugural Americans inducted into the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor at the Stonewall National Monument.
A widely influential poet who worked in accessible language to convey deep truths around identity, Jordan is celebrated today for both her literary writing and her dedicated advocacy for social justice and historically excluded groups. She died of breast cancer in 2002.
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More June Jordan
Video: Watch Jordan read "Poem of Commitment" at Kelly Writer House.
Text: Read poems by Jordan at the Academy of American Poets
Audio: Listen to Jordan read 13 of her poems
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Photo by Sara Miles.