and the University of Chicago (and earlier in a
virtually all-white environment at Milwood High
School and Northfield School for girls), Jordan
married Michael Meyer, a student, in 1955; in 1958
they had a son, Christopher David Meyer, and eight
years later they divorced. Her poem “Let Me Live
with Marriage” records that marriage’s unraveling,
ending with a heartbreaking Shakespearean cou-
plet: “if this be baffling then the error’s proved / To
live so long and leave my love unmoved.” Jordan
taught at City University of New York, Connecti-
cut College, Sarah Lawrence College, State Univer-
sity New York at Stony Brook, and Yale University
before accepting her final academic position as a
deeply committed professor of African-American
studies and director of Poetry for the People at the
University of California at Berkeley.
Jordan’s early childhood affected her work in
remarkable ways. Her father, who was determined
to make June a “soldier” because “there was a war
on against colored people,” instructed her in the
survival skills he felt were necessary for her to have,
demanding that she memorize and recite—before
she was five—Shakespeare’s plays, the Bible, and
the poetry of PAU L LAURENCE DUNBAR and Edgar
Allan Poe.
Jordan is the author of 28 books, including
Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays
of June Jordan (2002); Soldier: A Poet’s Child-
hood (2000), a bittersweet, unsettling memoir of
the first 12 years of June Jordan’s life; and Kissing
God Goodbye: Poems, 1991–1997 (1997). Jordan’s
poems are a singular howl against the relentless
laughter of evil. When she is angry, that anger is
purposeful. Her voice is decisive, and empowered
and it expresses her love for those she has reason to
claim in community and sisterhood.
Her determination to fight for social justice is
apparent in Soldier, which describes her father’s
misguided frustration, anger, protectiveness, and
love emerging in violence: “Like a growling beast,
the roll-away mahogany doors rumble open, and
the light snaps on and a fist smashes into the side
of my head and I am screaming awake: ‘Daddy!
What did I do?!’ ” Filled with lyrical recounting of
harrowing moments in the Jordan family home,
Soldier describes her father treating June like the
son he was determined to have, “This child him
my son,” Granville insisted to his wife: “What you
mean by Black? You want that she stay in the pits
where they t’row us down here?” Carried by her
mother to the Universal Truth Center on 125th
Street in Harlem on Sundays, Jordan observed that
by the age of two or three, “the distinctive belief
of that congregation began to make sense to me:
that ‘by declaring the truth, you create the truth.’ ”
Despite despair and disappointment at what she
saw as her mother’s self-abnegation, her mother’s
influence on her is apparent in her essay “Many
Rivers to Cross” and in poems like “Ah Momma,”
“Gettin Down to Get Over,” or “Ghaflah” (its title
a reference to the Islamic term for the sin of for-
getfulness, the poem itself an acknowledgement of
Jordan’s mother’s suffering in those years before
her suicide).
Jordan’s poetry includes Passion (1980), Liv-
ing Room: New Poems 1980–1984 (1985), Naming
Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems (1989), and
Haruko/Love Poems (1994). She is the author of a
children’s biography, Fannie Lou Hamer (1972);
several plays, one of which, The Issue, was directed
by NTOZAKE SHANGE at the New York Shakespeare
Festival; and two librettos, Bang Bang Uber Alles
(1985) and I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then
I Saw the Sky (1995). Her young adult novel His
Own Where (1971), nominated for a National Book
Award, was the first novel ever published in the
United States written entirely in black vernacular.
The author as well of six collections of politi-
cal essays, Jordan encouraged readers to explore
the power, beauty, and linguistic integrity of Black
English. In Civil Wars (1981), Jordan made an im-
passioned and eloquent plea for the survival of
Black English as a cultural and poetic necessity: “If
we lose our fluency in our language, we may ir-
reversibly forsake elements of the spirit that have
provided for our survival.” In On Call (1985), she
described translating, with a group of her students,
a part of ALICE WALKER’s The COLOR PURPLE into
white English so that they could see how much gets
lost, how much poetry is turned to prose, in that
translation. Among the essays in Technical Diffi-
culties: African-American Notes on the State of the
Union (1992), the collection that followed MovingJordan, June 289