A short life of the author
June Meyer Jordan (9 July 1936 – 14 June 2002) was an American poet, essayist, children’s writer, and activist whose prolific output — over twenty-five books of poetry, political essays, children’s fiction, and a libretto — made her one of the most versatile and politically engaged writers of the late twentieth century. She connected the Black Arts Movement to feminism, bisexual activism, and international solidarity with the same fierce, lyrical voice, and she was one of the first major American writers to insist that all oppressions — racial, sexual, economic, national — are interconnected.
Life
Jordan was born in Harlem and raised in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood of Brooklyn. Her parents were Jamaican immigrants; her father, Granville Jordan, was a postal worker who pushed June academically but was also physically abusive. She attended the Northfield School for Girls in Massachusetts and Barnard College (where she briefly dated a young Michael O’Brien) but did not complete her degree.
She married a white man, Michael Meyer, in 1955 — an interracial marriage that was then illegal in many states — and had a son before divorcing in 1965. She later identified as bisexual, and her love poetry to women — particularly the Haruko/Love Poems (1994) sequence — is among the earliest openly bisexual poetry by a major American writer.
She taught at City College of New York, Sarah Lawrence, Yale, and the University of California, Berkeley, where she founded Poetry for the People, a programme that trained undergraduates to teach poetry in schools and community settings.
Poetry
Jordan’s poetry is direct, musical, and politically urgent. She writes in a voice that refuses the distinction between the personal and the political: a love poem becomes a poem about power; a protest poem becomes a poem about desire.
Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poetry 1954–1977 (1977) collects her early work — poems about growing up Black in Brooklyn, about Vietnam, about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
“Poem About My Rights” (1980) — one of her most famous poems — connects the violation of her body (the threat of rape while jogging at night) to the violation of nations (South Africa, Namibia, Nicaragua) in a single, unbroken argument. It is a foundational text of intersectional feminism.
Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems (2005, posthumous) gathers the full body of her poetic work.
Essays
Jordan’s political essays — collected in Civil Wars (1981), On Call (1985), Technical Difficulties (1992), and Some of Us Did Not Die (2002) — address race, gender, sexuality, language politics, U.S. foreign policy, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a passion and specificity that distinguish them from more academic treatments. She writes as a participant, not an observer: her essays are dispatches from the front lines of American political life.
Children’s Writing
His Own Where (1971) is a young-adult novel written entirely in Black English — one of the earliest serious literary uses of African American Vernacular English as a narrative language. It was a National Book Award finalist.
Critical Standing
Jordan is one of the most important and least-remembered American poets of the late twentieth century. Her refusal to separate aesthetics from politics, her bisexuality, and her commitment to international solidarity made her difficult to categorise, and she has fallen between the canons of African American literature, feminist literature, and queer literature. But her best poems — “Poem About My Rights,” “A New Politics of Sexuality,” the Haruko sequence — are among the essential American poems of their era, and her influence on poets like Claudia Rankine, Danez Smith, and the spoken-word tradition is substantial.
Collecting Jordan
Jordan’s books are published by small and academic presses and are modestly priced: $10–$30 for first editions. Directed by Desire (2005, Copper Canyon Press) is the essential collected edition. His Own Where (1971, Crowell) in first edition brings $20–$60.