June Millicent Jordan (July 9, 1936 – June 14, 2002) was an American poet, essayist, teacher, and activist. In her writing she explored issues of gender, race, immigration, and representation.
Jordan was passionate about using Black English in her writing and poetry, teaching others to treat it as its own language and an important outlet for expressing Black culture.
Jordan was inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument in 2019.
Jordan was born in 1936 in Harlem, New York, as the only child of Granville Ivanhoe Jordan and Mildred Maude Fisher, immigrants from Jamaica and Panama. Her father was a postal worker for the USPS and her mother was a part-time nurse. When Jordan was five, the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, New York. Jordan credits her father with passing on his love of literature, and she began writing her own poetry at the age of seven.
Jordan describes the complexities of her early childhood in her 2000 memoir, Soldier: A Poet's Childhood. She explores her complicated relationship with her father, who encouraged her to read broadly and memorize passages of classical texts, but who would also beat her for the slightest misstep and call her "damn Black devil child." In her 1986 essay "For My American Family", Jordan explores the many conflicts in growing up as the child of Jamaican immigrant parents, whose visions of their daughter's future far exceeded the urban ghettos of her present. Jordan's mother died by suicide. Jordan recalls her father telling her: "There was a war against colored people, I had to become a soldier."
Jordan's education began in the New York City public school system, "beginning her studies at P.S. 26 elementary school." Jordan attended Brooklyn's Midwood High School for a year, beginning at age 12, before enrolling in Northfield Mount Hermon School, an elite preparatory school in New England. Both Midwood and Northfield had primarily White student bodies. Throughout her education, Jordan became "completely immersed in a White universe" by attending predominantly White schools; however, she was also able to construct and develop her identity as a Black American and a writer. In 1953, Jordan graduated from high school and enrolled at Barnard College in New York City.
Jordan later expressed how she felt about Barnard College in her 1981 book of essays Civil Wars, writing:
No one ever presented me with a single Black author, poet, historian, personage, or idea for that matter. Nor was I ever assigned a single woman to study as a thinker, or writer, or poet, or life force. Nothing that I learned, here, lessened my feeling of pain or confusion and bitterness as related to my origins: my street, my family, my friends. Nothing showed me how I might try to alter the political and economic realities underlying our Black condition in White America.
Due to this disconnect with the predominantly male, White curriculum, Jordan left Barnard without graduating. June Jordan emerged as a poet and political activist when Black female authors were beginning to be heard.
At Barnard College, when she was 19, Jordan met Columbia University student Michael Meyer, whom she married in 1955. She subsequently joined Meyer at the University of Chicago, where she pursued graduate studies in anthropology. She returned to Barnard after a year and remained for one more semester. In 1958, Jordan gave birth to the couple's only child, Christopher David Meyer. The couple divorced in 1965, and Jordan raised her son alone.
Jordan identified as bisexual.
Jordan's first published book, Who Look at Me (1969), was a collection of poems for children. It was followed by 27 more books in her lifetime, and one (Some of Us Did Not Die: Collected and New Essays) that was in press when she died. Two more have been published posthumously: Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), and the 1970 poetry anthology SoulScript, edited by Jordan, has been reissued.
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 by Peter Sellars. When asked about the writing process for the libretto of the opera, Jordan said:
The composer, John [Adams], said he needed to have the whole libretto before he could begin, so I just sat down last spring and wrote it in six weeks, I mean, that's all I did. I didn't do laundry, anything. I put myself into it 100 percent. What I gave to John and Peter [Sellars] is basically what Scribner's has published now.
After the 1964 riots, Jordan collaborated with architect and public speaker Buckminster Fuller to draft a proposal for "Skyrise for Harlem", a redesign of the Harlem area including 15 conical towers to house 250,000-500,000 Harlem residents, to be placed over existing buildings to provide a better environment for Harlem residents, including larger rooms and communal space. Jordan intended this as a way to help residents and allow them to imagine as well. However, their article, published in the April 1965 issue of Esquire, would have its original title "Skyrise for Harlem" changed to "Instant Slum Clearance", and would never be developed. Jordan later expressed her frustrations with the magazine in her book Civil Wars.
Jordan began her teaching career in 1967 at the City College of New York. Between 1968 and 1978 she taught at Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Connecticut College. She became the director of The Poetry Center at SUNY at Stony Brook and was an English professor there from 1978 to 1989. From 1989 to 2002 she was a full professor in the departments of English, Women's Studies, and African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Jordan was known as "the Poet of the People". At Berkeley, she founded the "Poetry for the People" program in 1991. Its aim was to inspire and empower students to use poetry as a means of artistic expression. Reflecting on how she began with the concept of the program, Jordan said:
I did not wake up one morning ablaze with a coherent vision of Poetry for the People! The natural intermingling of my ideas and my observations as an educator, a poet, and the African-American daughter of poorly documented immigrants did not lead me to any limiting ideological perspectives or resolve. Poetry for the People is the arduous and happy outcome of practical, day-by-day, classroom failure and success.