"June Millicent Jordan"(July 9,1936-June 14,2002)

Was a bisexual Caribbean-American writer and activist.She was born the only child of Jamaican

immigrants parents,Granville Ivanhoe and Mildred Maud Jordan,in Harlem,New York.Her father worked as a postal worker for the USPS and her mother as a part-time nurse.When June was five,the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn,New York.While life in in the Jordan household was often turbulent,June credits her daddy with passing on to her a love of literature \,and she began writing her own poetry at at the age of seven.She describes the complexities of her early childhood 2000 memoir,Soldier:A Poet's Childhood which she dedicated to her father.In this short memoir she explores her complicated relationship with a man who encouraged her to read broadly and memorize passages of classical texts,but also would also beat her for the slightest misstep and called her "damn black devil child."In her 1986 essay For My American Family June explores the many conflicts to be dealt in the experience of being raised by black immigrant parents with visions of the future for their offspring that far exceeded the urban ghettos of the present.In Soldier:A Poet's Childhood,June recalls her father "There was a war on against colored people,i had to become a soldier."While greatful to America for allowing him him to escape poverty and seek a better life for his family,June's father was conscious of the struggle his daughter would face and encouraged her to fight.After attending Brooklyn's Midwood high school for a year,June enrolled in Northfield Mount Hermon School,an elite preparatory school in New England.Throughout her education she became "completely immersed in a white universe by attending predominately white schools,was also able to construct and develop her identity as an African-American and writer.In 1953,June graduated from high school and enrolled at Barnard College.She later expressed how she felt about attending predominately white schools,was also able to construct and develop her identity as an African American and a writer.In 1953,June graduated from high school and enrolled at Barnard College.June later expressed how she felt about Barnard College in her book Civil Wars, she wrote:"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 orgins:my street,my family,my friends.Nothing showed me how I might try to alter the political economic realities underlying our Black condition in white America.It was at Barnard that June met a white Columbia University student Michael Meyer,whom she married in 1955,June subsequently followed her husband to the University of Chicago,where he would pursue graduate studies in anthropology.She also enrolled at the University but soon returned to Barnard where she remained until 1957.In 1958 June gave birth to the couple's only child,Christopher David Meyer.The couple divorced in 1965.Her first published book,Who Look at me (1969) and was a collection of poems for children.27 more books followed in her lifetime,one, (Some of Us Did Not Die,Collected and New Essays) was in press when she died.Two more have been published posthumously:Directed by Desire:The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Cooper Canyon Press,2005) and re-issue of the 1970 poetry collection SoulScript,edited by June.In memoir Soldier:A Poet's Childhood,June depicted in detail her relationship with her father in the book and was happy with the outcome stating,"I want to honor,my father,first of all and secondly,I wanted people to pay attention to a little girl who is gifted intellectually and creative,and to see that there's complexity here that we may otherwise not be prepared to acknowledge or even search for,let alone encourage,and to understand that this is an okay story.This a story, I think,with a happy outcome,you know.She was also an essayist,columnist for The Progressive,novelist,biographer,and librettist for the musical/opera I Was Looking at the Celling and Then I Saw the Sky,composed by John Adams and produced by Peter Sellars.When asked about the writing process of I Was Looking Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky June stated:"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 100 percent.What i gave to John & Peter [Sellars] is basically what Scribner's has published now.Her teaching career began in 1967 at the City College of New York.Between 1968 & 1978 she taught at Yale University,Sarah Lawrence College, and Connecticut College.June then became the director of the Poetry Center and was an English professor at Suny at Stony Brook from 1978-1989.From 1989-2002 she was full professor in the departments of English,Woman studies,and African America at the University of California Berkeley.At Berkeley June founded Poetry for the People in 1991.The program inspires and empowers students to use poetry as a means of artistic expression.Reflecting on how she began with the concept of the program June 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 author,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.June composed three guideline points that embodied the program,which was published with a set of her students writings in 1995,entitled June Jordan's Poetry for the People:A revolutionary Blueprint.She died of breast cancer at her home in Berkeley California.