June Jordan

June Jordan (July 9, 1936 to June 14, 2002) was an American poet, essayist, teacher and activist who spent much of her career teaching in university classrooms while writing extensively about race, gender and political struggle. She began teaching at City College of New York in 1967, then taught at Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College and Connecticut College through the 1970s, directed the Poetry Center at the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1978 to 1989, and from 1989 until her death held a full professorship in English, Women's Studies and African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1991 she founded Poetry for the People at Berkeley, a program that trained students to teach poetry writing to community members, later described in the 1995 book June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint as growing out of what she called classroom failure and success. The program became a model for using poetry as a teaching tool for self-expression and civic voice.