June Jordan

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June Millicent Jordan (July 9, 1936 – June 14, 2002) was a Jamaican self-identified Bisexual+ poet, essayist, researcher, and activist.

She investigated topics of gender, ethnicity, immigration, and representation in her writing.

Early life

Jordan was born in 1936 in Harlem, New York, as the only child of Granville Ivanhoe and Mildred Maude Fisher, emigrants from Jamaica and Panama. Her father was a postal worker for the USPS, and her mother was a part-time nurse. The family moved from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York, when Jordan was five years old. Jordan attributes her father's death on literature to his love for reading, and she started writing her own poetry at the age of seven.

In her 2000 memoir Soldier: A Poet's Childhood, Jordan explores the complexity of her early childhood. She explores her tumultuous relationship with her father, who encouraged her to read widely and memorize passages of classical texts, but she will also be chastised for the slightest misstep and refer to her as a "damn black devil child." Jordan's essay "For My American Family," a 1986 essay, explores the many challenges that have arisen as a child of Jamaican immigrant parents whose expectations of their daughter's future far outweighed the urban ghettos of her present. Jordan's mother died by suicide. "I had a war against colored people, so I had to become a soldier," Jordan recalls.

"Before starting her studies at P.S., Jordan's education began in the New York City public schools system." "There are 26 elementary schools" in the United States. Jordan attended Midwood High School in Brooklyn, beginning at the age of 12, before enrolling in Northfield Mount Hermon School, an elite preparatory school in New England. Both Milwood and Northfield were mainly white student bodies. Jordan became "completely embedded in a white universe" during her education by attending mainly white schools; however, she was also able to create and refine her identity as a black American and a writer. Jordan graduated from high school and enrolled at Barnard College in New York City in 1953.

In her 1981 book of essays Civil Wars, Jordan later wrote about Barnard College.

Jordan left Barnard without graduating due to this mismatch with the predominant male, white curriculum. When black female writers were first recognized, June Jordan emerged as a writer and political activist.

Personal life

Jordan was 19 years old at Barnard College, and she met Columbia University student Michael Meyer, who married in 1955. She then followed her husband to the University of Chicago, where she pursued graduate studies in anthropology. She was also enrolled at the university, but she soon returned to Barnard, where she stayed until 1957. Christopher David Meyer, the couple's sole child, was born in 1958. The couple divorced in 1965, but Jordan raised her son alone.

She wrote:

Jordan wrote with passion from the start. She also identified herself as bisexual in her writing, a practice she refused to deny even though the situation was stigmatized.

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Career

Who Look at Me (1969), Jordan's first published book, was a collection of poems for children. It was followed by 27 more books in her lifetime, including one (Some of Us Did Not Die: Collected and New Essays) that was in press when she died. Two more have been published posthumously: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), and the 1970 poetry collection SoulScript, edited by Jordan, have been reissued.

She was also an essayist, columnist, and librettist for the nibel/opera I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, which was composed by John Adams and produced by Peter Sellars. When asked about the authorship of the opera's libretto, Jordan said: "Itto's libretto is a story about the poet's libretto."

Jordan began teaching at the City College of New York in 1967. She taught at Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Connecticut College from 1968 to 1978. She was the director of the Poetry Center at SUNY Stony Brook and an English professor there from 1978 to 1989. She served as a full professor in the departments of English, Women's Studies, and African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1989 to 2002.

Jordan was regarded as "the Poet of the People." In 1991, she founded the "Poetry for the People" initiative at Berkeley. Its aim was to inspire and encourage students to use poetry as a form of artistic expression. Jordan was reflecting on how she was introduced to the program's concept: 'She began with the program's design,' she wrote:

In 1995, Jordan published three guideline points that embodied the program, Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint. She was not only a writer and a poet, but she also wrote children's books.

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