Black Genius Spectrum - June Jordan
“Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.” – June Jordan
June Jordan (1936-2002) was a poet, activist, journalist, essayist, and educator. She was widely considered one of the most published and highly acclaimed Jamaican-American writers of her generation. Masterful across genres, her work was both autobiographical and that which bore witness to the human condition. A global citizen with a deep commitment to civil rights, women’s rights, LGTBQ rights and anti-war movements, she used her work to share powerful visions for the liberation and solidarity of marginalized and oppressed people.
Celebrated by Toni Morrison as a writer who “has comforted, explained, described, wrestled with, taught and made us laugh out loud before we wept,” Jordan’s expansive career produced more than twenty five major works of poetry, fiction and essays in addition to numerous children’s books. Jordan also wrote the librettos for two operas and frequently collaborated with and wrote lyrics for musicians, plays and musicals. She was a regular columnist for The Progressive and was widely published in magazines and newspapers around the world.
As an educator, Jordan taught at City College of New York, Yale University and Sarah Lawrence College. She later became a professor of English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she directed The Poetry Center and in 1988 was appointed professor of African-American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she founded the influential poetry program Poetry for the People.
She also earned countless awards and honors, including a 1969-1970 Rockefeller grant for creative writing, a Yaddo residency (1979), a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship (1982) and the Achievement Award for International Reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists (1984). Jordan also won the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writers Award (1995-1998), the Ground Breakers-Dream Makers Award from The Woman's Foundation (1994), the Chancellor's Distinguished Lectureship from the University of California at Berkeley, the PEN Center USA West Freedom to Write Award (1991), a congressional citation for her outstanding contributions to literature, the progressive movement and the civil rights movement and an induction to the Stone Wall Inn’s National LGBTQ Wall of Honor.
Beyond her own accolades, she valiantly fought for the recognition of others including that of writing peers James Baldwin and Toni Morrison in “Black Writers in Praise of Toni Morrison.”
As stated by Jordan, “as a Black woman, I have always had to invent the power my freedom required.” We are grateful for her genius and the many ways that she has created space for us to follow in her footsteps and invent the power that our freedom requires.
To learn more about June Jordan, please visit:
June Jordan website: http://www.junejordan.net
The Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/june-jordan
Poetry for the People: https://africam.berkeley.edu/poetry-for-the-people/
To experience some of June Jordan’s musical collaborations, please check out the following projects:
Meshell Ndegeocello’s Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape - “Interlude: 6 Legged Griot Trio (Weariness)” featuring June Jordan, Claude McKay and Etheridge Knight
Sweet Honey in the Rock’s …twenty-five… and Breaths - “We Are the Ones,” “Oughta Be A Woman” and “Alla That’s All Right, But”
In May 2021, Copper Canyon Press released The June Jordan Reader a posthumous collection of poems published between 1971 and 2001.