June Jordan
June Jordan joined poetry to political action, writing about racism, sexuality and language and teaching others to make their voices heard.
June Jordan was born in New York City in 1936. The daughter of Jamaican immigrants, she grew up in Harlem and Brooklyn. She became a poet, essayist and teacher whose work connected intimate experience with struggles over power and belonging.
Across poetry, essays and children’s books, Jordan addressed racism, violence, feminism and international solidarity. She defended Black English as a language with its own expressive authority and challenged the assumption that literary excellence required abandoning the speech of one’s community.
Openly bisexual, she wrote about sexuality as a field of freedom and political possibility. Her essay “A New Politics of Sexuality” resisted demands that people organise desire within rigid categories. Her writing combined arguments about identity with a commitment to relationships across social boundaries.
At the University of California, Berkeley, Jordan founded Poetry for the People in 1991. The programme brought reading, writing and public performance together, encouraging students and wider communities to use poetry as a means of expression and action. Jordan died in Berkeley in 2002, aged sixty-five.