About June Jordan
June Jordan (July 9, 1936 – June 14, 2002) was an African American poet, essayist, teacher, and activist of Jamaican descent. In her writing, she explored issues of gender, race, immigration, and representation. June Jordan used African American English (AAE or Black English) in her writing and poetry, advocating for its appropriation, its recognition as one's own language, and its use as an important tool for expressing Black culture. She was inducted into the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor at Stonewall National Monument in 2019.June Jordan's first published book, Who Look at Me (1969), was a collection of poems for children. She wrote 27 more during her lifetime. Two others were published posthumously: Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2005) and a reissue of the poetry collection SoulScript.
Jordan recounts her difficult childhood in Soldier: A Poet's Childhood, published in 2000. In it, she explores her complicated relationship with her father, who encouraged her to read and memorize passages from classical texts, but who beat her for the slightest misstep. In On Call: Political Essays (South End Press, 1985), she discusses her mother's suicide.
June Jordan has received numerous honors and awards, including a Rockefeller Creative Writing Fellowship in 1969-1970, a Yaddo Fellowship in 1979, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1982, and the National Association of Black Journalists' Achievement Award for International Reporting in 1984. She also won the Lila Acheson Wallace Reader's Digest Writers Award from 1995 to 1998, as well as the Woman's Foundation's Ground Breakers-Dream Makers Award in 1994.
June Jordan died of breast cancer at her home in Berkeley, California, on June 14, 2002, at the age of 65.
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Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.
