JORDAN, June (M.)

Born 9 July 1936, New York, New York

Daughter of Granville Ivanhoe and Mildred Maude Fisher Jordan; married Michael Meyer, 1955 (divorced 1965); children: Christopher

Prolific and expansive in her interests and subject matter, June Jordan works in a variety of literary forms including poetry, essays, drama, fiction, and children's literature. She combines writing with her roles as political activist, teacher, composer, and urban planner. Her parents, Granville and Mildred Jordan, emigrated from Jamaica to New York City, where Jordan, their only child, was born on 9 July 1936 in Harlem. When she was five, the family moved to a brownstone on Hancock Street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, and it was there she began writing poetry at the age of seven.

Her parents were working people who struggled to make ends meet, and both eventually went on the night shift to earn a little more pay, her father as a postal clerk and her mother as a nurse. The many difficulties of trying to survive took a toll on the family, and Jordan has written that her parents' strictness and her father's excessive use of physical punishment caused her a great deal of suffering and anger. Nevertheless, she has acknowledged her love for them and her gratitude for a home where poetry and the creative spirit were a part of everyday life. Her father introduced her to the Bible, Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, and the dialect poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Her mother took her at an early age to services at the Universal Truth Center, where Jordan was exposed to the scriptural concept of the Word and the congregation's belief that by declaring the truth, you create the truth.

Mildred also confided to her daughter that she had once wanted to be an artist. In the Reid Lecture at Barnard College in 1975, and later in the introduction to Civil Wars (1981), Jordan honored the wish to be an artist as an inheritance from her mother and recognized the extent of her mother's sacrifice in giving up not only her calling but also her very life when she committed suicide in 1966.

After spending her childhood in a black environment, Jordan began her secondary education with a commute of one hour and twenty minutes to Midwood High School, where she was the only African-American in a student body of 3,000. The following year she went to Northfield School for Girls, a prep school in Massachusetts, and found herself once again in a white universe. When she entered Barnard College in 1953, the pattern continued with a program centered around only those thinkers and artists who were white and male. She drew upon her experiences as a student—and also upon her experiences as an educator in such projects as The Voice of the Children workshop in the mid-1960s—to formulate her ideas about the promotion of Black English and African-American art, and the inclusion of women along with men as subjects of study in school.

During her sophomore year at Barnard, she met Michael Meyer, a white student in his senior year at Columbia University. They married in 1955 and had a son, Christopher David, in 1958. At the time, interracial marriage was a felony in 43 states, and they often found themselves the object of insults and slurs. The situation within the larger society, part of which was the strife during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, put enormous stress on their relationship, and the marriage ended in 1965.

As a single parent, Jordan supported herself and her son initially through freelance journalism, a field in which she has continued to be active as a columnist for The Progressive since 1989. Her long and varied career as a teacher began in 1967 with a position at the City College of New York. She subsequently taught at Sarah Lawrence College and Yale University, and from 1978 to 1989 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she also directed the Poetry Center and Creative Writing Program. In 1986 she was the Chancellor's Distinguished Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley and joined the faculty at Berkeley in 1989 as Professor of Afro-American Studies and Women's Studies.

Her first book, Who Look At Me, appeared in 1969, and since then there has been a steady stream of work that includes theater and performance pieces and books for young people and major collections of poems and essays. Written in Black English, her novel His Own Where (1971) reflects her interest in urban planning and her collaboration with R. Buckminster Fuller in rethinking the design of Harlem to foster black life. It was the basis for her winning the Prix de Rome in environmental design (1970-71), for which Fuller had recommended her. From the beginning, Jordan's work has fused poetic expression and political statement as she balances her moral outrage with her belief in love and the transformative power of language. In recent years her concerns have become increasingly international in scope. She has addressed issues in such countries as Angola, Lebanon, and Nicaragua. She was presented the PEN Freedom-to-Write award in 1991 and the decade has seen a rich output of her political thinking in the collections Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union (1992) and Affirmative Acts: Political Essays (1998).

Other Works:

Some Changes (1971). Dry Victories (1972). Fannie Lou Hamer (1972). New Days: Poems of Exile and Return (1974). New Life: New Room (1975). Things that I Do in the Dark: Selected Poetry (1977). Passion: New Poems, 1977-1980 (1980). Kimako's Story (1981). Living Room: New Poems (1985). On Call: Political Essays (1985). Lyrical Campaigns: Selected Poems (1989). Moving Towards Home: Political Essays (1989). Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems (1989). Haruko/ Love Poems (1994). I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: the Libretto and Lyrics (1995). Kissing God Goodbye: poems 1991-97 (1997).

Bibliography:

Bowles, J., ed., In the Memory and Spirit of Frances, Zora, and Lorraine: Essays and Interviews on Black Women and Writing (1979). Davenport, D., "Four Contemporary Black Women Poets: Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Sherley Ann Williams" (dissertation, 1985). Smith, V., ed., African American Writers (1991).

Reference works:

CANR (1989). Contemporary Poets (1991). CLC (1976, 1979, 1983). DLB (1985).

Other references:

African American Review (Fall 1998). Callaloo 9 (Winter 1986). DAI (Jan. 1987). Essence (April 1981). Feminist Review 31 (Spring 1989). High Plains Literary Rev. (Fall 1988).

—MARLENE M. MILLER