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Jordan, June
6 articles on Jordan, June
Jordan, June
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 752 Includes: Bibliography(b. 9 July 1936; d. 14 June 2002), writer, editor, poet, educator, and social activist. The only child of Granville Ivanhoe and Mildred Maude Fischer Jordan, June Jordan was born in Harlem. Her parents were immigrants from rural Jamaica. June's father worked as a night-shift postal clerk, and her mother worked part-time as a private-duty nurse. The family lived in Harlem until June was six years old, at which point they moved to an apartment on Hancock Street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. There young June's father continued the physical abuse that he had subjected her to since she was only two years old. It was in this terrifying environment of bullying and severe beatings that seven-year-old June found solace in the written word and began writing poetry. In her 2000 memoir Soldier: ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 505 Includes: Bibliography1936–2002
African American poet, writer, and educator, who intertwined personal and political issues in her creative work. From the publication in 1969 of her first poetry collection, Who Look at Me, June Jordan pursued a successful career as poet, writer, educator, and activist. Along with numerous volumes of poetry she published plays, political essays, and fiction for children and young adults. Her novel, His Own Where (1971), written entirely in Black English, was nominated for a National Book Award in 1972. Autobiographical elements figure prominently in her work, as do political and social issues. According to the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997), Jordan sought throughout her career to redress the “long-neglected history of black women everywhere” and to critique “versions of feminism, both American and international, ...
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Source: African American National Biography
Word Count: 1919 Includes: Further Reading | Obituaries:(9 July 1936–14 June 2002), poet, essayist, teacher, and activist, was born in Harlem, New York, the daughter of Jamaican-born parents Mildred Maud Fisher, a nurse, and Granville Ivanhoe Jordan, a postal clerk. Mildred, who was half East Indian, was a quiet and religious woman who had given up a career as an artist to marry; she struggled with depression and eventually committed suicide in 1966. Jordan's father, who was half Chinese and a follower of the black nationalist Marcus Garvey, made no apologies for his dissatisfaction with his only child's gender. He had wanted a boy and treated Jordan as such. Referring to her as “he” and “the boy,” Granville subjected his young daughter to rigorous mental and physical training regimens that included camping, fishing, and boxing instruction; aggressive mathematical and literary testing; and often brutal physical beatings. Jordan describes her ...
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Source: Black Women in America, Second Edition
Word Count: 1143 Includes: Bibliography(b. 9 July 1936 ; d. 14 June 2002 ),
poet, essayist. June Jordan was one of America's most widely published African American writers, with a career spanning four decades. Her lifelong friend and former editor, Toni Morrison , called her “our premiere Black woman essayist.” The twenty-eight books authored by this activist and scholar contained award-winning poetry and essays. Her most recent works included a memoir, Soldier: A Poet's Childhood ( 2000 ), and Some of Us Did Not Die ( 2002 ), a powerful reflection on the events of September 11, 2001 , her own battle with breast cancer, and other issues ranging from sexuality to the infamous professional boxer ...
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Source: The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature
Word Count: 3351 Includes: Childhood and Influences | Early Publications | Poet of the New World | Reputation and Legacy | Selected Works | Further ReadingJune Jordan was a passionate and prolific author and advocate for social justice. She was a distinctly American poet who also took on international issues in her work and made original contributions in a remarkably wide panorama of genres. Her published and performed works include eight volumes of poetry, six collections of essays, four children's books, an opera libretto, the text and lyrics of two staged musical productions, and two anthologies that she edited. She expanded her early advocacy of African-American self-determination and pride to an insistence on universal rights of political, cultural, and personal autonomy. Jordan's poetry is on fire with the heat of her love and with her outrage at human oppression. Often she blended the two:o believe it love
...
believe
the bleeding fills the
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Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
Word Count: 2103(b. 1936), poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, educator, activist, biographer, and anthologist. In addition to her distinguished career as a college professor, June Jordan is a well-known, prolific writer of poetry, children's and young adult literature, and essays. She has earned critical praise and popular recognition for her exceptional literary skill and her social and political acumen. Having come of age as a writer and cultural commentator during the “second renaissance” of African American arts in the 1960s and 1970s, Jordan is among the significant artists of this cultural revival and of the rise of black consciousness in the 1960s.Born in Harlem, New York, on 9 July 1936, June Jordan is the only child of Granville Ivanhoe Jordan and Mildred Maud (Fisher) Jordan, who came toAfter ...
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