June Jordan

June Millicent Jordan was born on the ninth of July 1936 at Harlem, New York, the only daughter of Granville Ivanhoe Jordan — a Jamaican-born postal clerk who taught his daughter Shakespeare and the King James Bible at home through her early childhood — and Mildred Maud Fisher Jordan, a Jamaican-Panamanian nurse. The family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant district of Brooklyn when she was five and to a brownstone purchased by her father at 670 Hancock Street in 1942. Her father's plan that she should become a great writer in the line of John Donne and William Shakespeare was sustained against her objection through her secondary education.

She attended the Northfield Mount Hermon school in Massachusetts on scholarship from 1950 to 1953 — among the very few Black students in the cohort. She entered Barnard College in 1953, met the white Columbia anthropologist Michael Meyer at the Asia House Gallery in 1955, married him in 1955, and across the following decade pursued her studies and the birth of her son Christopher Meyer in 1958 alongside her parallel career as a New York City freelance writer. The marriage ended in 1965.

She joined the New York City Public School System and the urban-design programme of the New York architectural firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in 1968 — in which capacity she collaborated with the Black architect Robert Newman on a plan for the reconstruction of Harlem published in Esquire in April 1965 as Skyrise for Harlem. She published her first volume — Who Look at Me — in 1969. She published across the following thirty-three years more than thirty further volumes — poetry, essays, criticism, a memoir, children's books, an opera libretto.

Her decisive academic appointment was at the University of California Berkeley from 1989. The Poetry for the People programme she founded at Berkeley in 1991 — by her death in 2002 had trained over three thousand undergraduate students in the writing and teaching of poetry in public-school and prison settings. She held the appointment at Berkeley until her death.

She died of breast cancer at Berkeley on the fourteenth of June 2002, at sixty-five.

She is honored here as the founder of Poetry for the People.