I know
all things are dear
that disappear
all things are dear
that disappear.Like Whitman, she put her queer shoulder to
the wheel to write not only of eros in its widest
sense but of a passionate, familial love of human-
ity. Like GWENDOLYN BROOKS—who, when asked,
“Race?” answered “Human,” and when asked “Re-
ligion?” replied “Kindness”—Jordan claimed her
African-American identity most intensely by the
political convictions that accompanied her pro-
found sense of moral responsibility to the entire
human race. After the 1982 massacre of refugees
in Beirut, Jordan declared in “Moving Towards
Home,” “I was born a Black woman / and now / I
am become a Palestinian.”
The winner of numerous prizes and honors,
among them, Rockefeller and National Endow-
ment fors the Arts grants and the Prix de Rome
in Environmental Design for a project originating
from a plan for the architectural redesign of Har-
lem (a collaboration with Buckminster Fuller) in
1998, she received both the American Institute of
Architecture’s Award as one of the coauthors of a
proposal for a design for the African Burial Ground
in New York City and a lifetime achievement award
from the National Black Writers’ Conference.
During a decade long struggle with breast can-
cer (she died on June 14, 2002), June continued
to teach and to write until almost her last breath.
Jordan’s commitment and love lives on in Poetry
for the People, the enormously successful program
created in her name at University of California
at Berkeley. With outreach to local high schools,
church congregations, and correctional facilities
as well as to university students from all disci-
plines, Poetry for the People introduces students
to poetry as culture, history, criticism, politics, and
practice, requiring students to learn both the tech-
nical structure of various forms of poetry and the
worldviews that inform specific poetic traditions.
Summoning America in the aftermath of Sep-
tember 11 to honor the dead by fighting for the
living, by fighting for justice, not for vengeance,
June yoked the image of cultural survival to her
own courageous struggle. Some of Us Did Not Die
contains a poem in which June imagines a preda-
tory hawk circling above her own dying body:“He makes that dive
to savage
me... I roll away
I speak
I laugh out loud
Not yet
big bird of prey
not yet.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ards, Angela. “The Faithful, Fighting, Writing Life
of Poet-Activist June Jordan, 1936–2002.” Black
Issues Book Review 4, no. 5 (September/October
2002): 63–64.
DeVeaux, Alexis. “A Conversation with June Jordan.”
Essence, September 2000.
Erickson, Peter, “June Jordan.” In Dictionary of Liter-
ary Biography. Vol. 38, Afro-American Writers after
1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers, 146–162. De-
troit: Gale Research Co., 1985.
———. “The Love Poetry of June Jordan.” Callaloo
(Winter 1986): 221–234.
MacPhail, Scott. “June Jordan and the New Black
Intellectuals.” African American Review, 33, no. 1
(Spring 1999): 57–71.
Lynda KoolishJubilee Margaret Walker Alexander (1966)
Preceding such award-winning novels as Alex
Haley’s Roots (1976), TONI MORRISON’s BELOVED
(1987), and SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS’s DESSA ROSE
(1986), MARGARET WALKER’s Jubilee in many ways
initiated the neo–slave narrative genre in 20th
century African-American literature. In it Walker
chronicles Vyry Johnson’s movement from slavery
to freedom. Submitted as part of her work toward
a Ph.D. degree at the University of Iowa, Jubilee is
based on the oral stories Walker’s grandparents,Jubilee 291