Published in 2019 (first published 1977)
203 pages
June Millicent Jordan (1936 – 2002) was a Caribbean-American poet and activist.
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. Jordan 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 received the Chancellor’s Distinguished Lectureship from UC Berkeley and the PEN Center USA West Freedom to Write Award (1991).
What is this book about?
This collection of her poems from the late fifties to mid seventies is so vibrant and alive with beauty and power.
June Jordan cultivated, during her prolific and passionate life, a personality of those difficult to pigeonhole. She was a university professor, civil rights activist, cultural promoter, political journalist, children’s book writer and essayist, among other various interests that were condensed and echoed in her literary production, especially in her poetry. Her poems were an instrument to strengthen solidarity and a vehicle to explore the traces that crossed her body and her identity; her life was marked by fire by the fact of being a woman, black and bisexual in a society that, driven by the numerous social movements that fought for the expansion of rights, was gradually collapsing some prejudices.
