June Jordan

June Jordan was a courageous agitator for change, writing with love and rage at the front lines of American poetry and of injustice on an international scale. She gained renown as both an essayist and political writer, penning a regular column for the Progressive. Jordan was the founder of the Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley and the recipient of a congressional citation for her outstanding contributions to literature, the progressive movement, and the civil rights movement. Her poetry is known for its immediacy and accessibility as well as its interest in identity and the representation of personal, lived experience—her poetry is often deeply autobiographical. Jordan’s work also frequently imagines a radical, globalized notion of solidarity among the world’s marginalized and oppressed.