June Jordan, 1936-2002

Award-winning author, poet, and social and political activist, June Jordan was born on July 9, 1936, in Harlem, New York, to Granville Ivanhoe Jordan and Mildred Fisher Jordan, both immigrants from Jamaica. The family lived in Harlem for the first five years of Jordan's life. Then, hoping that their daughter would receive a better education, the family moved from Harlem to Bedford-Stuyvesant, a neighborhood of Brooklyn. Jordan attended public schools in Brooklyn, until 1950, when she entered the Northfield School for Girls, a Protestant finishing school in Massachusetts. She graduated from Northfield in 1953 at age sixteen; and a short time after entering Barnard College, she changed her major from music to English. As an undergraduate at Barnard (1953-1955), she met Michael Meyer, a white student at Columbia University. The couple married in 1955 and moved to Chicago, where Meyer pursued graduate studies in anthropology at the University of Chicago. Jordan enrolled in the University of Chicago but within a year returned to New York and re-entered Barnard for a semester. She withdrew following the birth of her son (and only child), Christopher David, in 1958. She later enrolled in Hunter College (1962), but left the college before completing her degree. While Jordan's long-distance marriage continued for several years, the couple filed for divorce in 1964. Dedicated to urban development, in 1964 she collaborated with R. Buckminster Fuller on an architectural re-design of Harlem. She also worked as a research associate and writer for the Mobilization for Youth, Inc., on the lower East Side of Manhattan.

Initially, Jordan worked as a freelance writer to supplement her income. In the late 1960s, she wrote both fiction and nonfiction, and began reading her poetry at paid engagements arranged by the American Academy of Poets. At the same time, Jordan worked as a lecturer and adjunct faculty member at several institutions, including Connecticut College (1968), and the City College of New York. She also served as writer-participant for the Teachers-Writers Collaborative Program, Columbia University. With Fuller's support, Jordan received an award for creative writing from the Rockefeller Foundation (1969), as well as a Prix de Rome in Environmental Design (1970). While she retained an interest in urban planning and development, by the early 1970s Jordan concentrated her efforts more fully on writing and teaching, using her talents to address issues of discrimination based on race and gender, as well other politically controversial issues. Throughout her life Jordan advocated teaching Black English, not only as a means of teaching black children to read, but as a method for African American writers to develop identity and voice. She wrote children's poems and books in Black English, including her first novel, His Own Where . During the same period of her career, she continued adjunct work at various colleges: Sarah Lawrence College (1971-1975), Yale University (1974-1975), and Macalester College (Visiting Poet, 1980), before accepting a tenured position at SUNY Stony Brook (1978-1989). Additionally, she taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (Visiting Professor in African American Studies, 1988). In 1988, she accepted a joint appointment as Professor of African American Studies and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB).

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