June Jordan’s career as a poet, essayist, novelist, librettist, educator, and activist spanned the civil rights movement, second wave feminism, the Stonewall Riots, and the general upheaval of the latter half of the 20th century. Her education among classes and faculty composed largely of white people was steeped in literary canon borrowed from English and European traditions, all very white and very male. She married and later separated from Michael Meyer, a white man with whom she had a son. Among racial tension and nationwide bigotry, general anti-gay bias, and resistance to bisexuality even within the gay community, Jordan, an openly bisexual single mother of a child with a white father and Black mother, sought to dismantle the literary canon and make way for Black voices, including her own.

A catchphrase of student movements and second-wave feminists in the late 1960s and 1970s was “the personal is political.” Jordan did more than most to blur—and even erase—the line between the private and the political in both her published work and her teaching. She championed the use of Black English in the creation of prose and poetry by Black writers and particularly encouraged children and young writers to embrace a rich language they could

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