June Jordan (1936–2002) was a Jamaican American self-identified bisexual+ poet, essayist, teacher, and activist. In her writing she explored issues of gender, race, immigration, and representation. She enrolled in Barnard College, but ended up leaving without graduating, however did return to earn her bachelor of arts degree. Her first published book, Who Look at Me (1969), was a collection of poems for children. It was followed by 27 more books in her lifetime, and one (Some of Us Did Not Die: Collected and New Essays) of which was in press when she died. Two more have been published posthumously: Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), and the 1970 poetry collection SoulScript, edited by Jordan, has been reissued. She was also an essayist, columnist for The Progressive, novelist, biographer, and librettist for the musical/opera I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, composed by John Adams and produced by Peter Sellars. Jordan began her teaching career in 1967 at the City College of New York. Between 1968 and 1978 she taught at Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Connecticut College. She became the director of The Poetry Center at SUNY at Stony Brook and was an English professor there from 1978 to 1989. From 1989 to 2002 she was a full professor in the departments of English, women's studies, and African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, she founded the "Poetry for the People" program in 1991. Its aim was to inspire and empower students to use poetry as a means of artistic expression.
Jordan received numerous honors and awards, including a 1969-70 Rockefeller grant for creative writing, a Yaddo Fellowship in 1979, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1982, and the Achievement Award for International Reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists in 1984. She also won the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writers Award from 1995 to 1998, as well as the Ground Breakers-Dream Makers Award from The Woman's Foundation in 1994. She was included in Who's Who in America from 1984 until her death. She received the Chancellor's Distinguished Lectureship from UC Berkeley and the PEN Center USA West Freedom to Write Award (1991). In 2005, Directed by Desire: Collected Poems, a posthumous collection of her work, had to compete (and won) in the category "Lesbian Poetry" at the Lambda Literary Awards, even though Jordan identified as bisexual. However, BiNet USA led the bisexual community in a multi-year campaign eventually resulting in the addition of a Bisexual category, starting with the 2006 Awards. June Jordan died of breast cancer in 2002. Shortly before her death, she completed Some of Us Did Not Die, her seventh collection of political essays (and 27th book). In 2004, the June Jordan School for Equity (formerly known as the Small School for Equity) in San Francisco was named after her by its first ninth grade class. A conference room was named for her in the University of California, Berkeley's Eshleman Hall, which is used by the Associated Students of the University of California. In June 2019, Jordan was one of the inaugural fifty American “pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes” inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument (SNM) in New York City’s Stonewall Inn.
