1. June Jordan was inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument in 2019.
15 Facts About June Jordan
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June Jordan was born in 1936 in Harlem, New York, as the only child of Granville Ivanhoe June Jordan and Mildred Maude Fisher, immigrants from Jamaica and Panama.
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June Jordan describes the complexities of her early childhood in her 2000 memoir, Soldier: A Poet's Childhood.
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In 1953, June Jordan graduated from high school and enrolled at Barnard College in New York City.
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June Jordan later expressed how she felt about Barnard College in her 1981 book of essays Civil Wars, writing:.
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At Barnard College, when she was 19, June Jordan met Columbia University student Michael Meyer, whom she married in 1955.
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June Jordan enrolled at the university but soon returned to Barnard, where she remained until 1957.
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In 1958, June Jordan gave birth to the couple's only child, Christopher David Meyer.
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The couple divorced in 1965, and June Jordan raised her son alone.
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June Jordan began her teaching career in 1967 at the City College of New York.
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June Jordan became the director of The Poetry Center at SUNY at Stony Brook and was an English professor there from 1978 to 1989.
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June Jordan was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1972 for her young adult novel His Own Where.
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June Jordan was included in Who's Who in America from 1984 until her death in 2002.
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June Jordan received the Chancellor's Distinguished Lectureship from UC Berkeley and the PEN Center USA West Freedom to Write Award in 1991.
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In 2005, Directed by Desire: Collected Poems, a posthumous collection of her work, received a Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry even though June Jordan identified as bisexual.