June Jordan

June Millicent Jordan was born on the ninth of July 1936 in Harlem, New York, the only child of Granville Ivanhoe Jordan, a Jamaican-born postal clerk who taught his daughter Shakespeare and the King James Bible, and Mildred Maude Fisher, a Panamanian-born part-time nurse. When she was five the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant district of Brooklyn. She began writing poetry at the age of seven, and after schooling that carried her through a Massachusetts preparatory school and Barnard College, she committed her life to the word as instrument of both beauty and justice.

Jordan's gifts refused a single vessel. In 1964 she joined the architect R. Buckminster Fuller on a visionary redesign of Harlem she titled "Skyrise for Harlem," an act of civic imagination that later won her a Rome Prize in environmental design in 1970. Poet, essayist, novelist, playwright, journalist, and teacher, she published some thirty books across four decades, among them the landmark collection "Things That I Do in the Dark" (1977), edited by Toni Morrison.

Her teaching moved from City College and Yale to Sarah Lawrence, Connecticut College, and SUNY Stony Brook, and finally to the University of California, Berkeley, where from 1989 she was a full professor of English, Women's Studies, and African American Studies. There, in 1991, she founded Poetry for the People, a program that placed the making of poems in the hands of students and communities long told the art was not theirs.

Across her work she wielded Black English as a language of dignity and insisted that poetry belonged to everyone. June Jordan died of breast cancer at her home in Berkeley on the fourteenth of June 2002, aged sixty-five. She remains an honored voice who taught a people to name themselves and to build a more just world in words.