June Millicent Jordan was born in Harlem in 1936 and raised in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood as the daughter of Jamaican immigrants. Her upbringing was influenced by two contrasting forces: a father who strongly encouraged her to pursue literature, sometimes resorting to violence, and a city buzzing with Black cultural and political vibrancy. She began writing at a young age and never truly stopped.
Jordan attended Barnard College and the University of Chicago, though she didn't complete a degree at either institution. That didn't hinder her progress. By the 1960s, she was already publishing poetry and actively participating in the civil rights movement, maintaining her political engagement throughout her life — encompassing the Black Power movement, feminism, anti-war activism, and more.
“What distinguished Jordan from many of her peers was her refusal to divide the personal from the political.”
A poem about her mother's struggles with depression could easily sit alongside one addressing Israeli military actions or police brutality in America. She felt those topics deserved the same space. Her writing reflected this belief — she used both standard English and Black English, and she became a passionate advocate for Black English, viewing it as a valid, expressive, rule-governed language rather than a lesser form of another.
For decades, she taught, most notably at UC Berkeley, where she established Poetry for the People in 1991. This initiative was based on the belief that poetry should be accessible to everyone, not just to those with MFA degrees or library access. Students in the program wrote, performed, and brought poetry to communities that rarely had the opportunity to engage with it.
