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Book Cover for: Some of Us Did Not Die: Selected Essays, June Jordan

Some of Us Did Not Die: Selected Essays

June Jordan

"Forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art." --Toni Morrison

Some of Us Did Not Die brings together the seminal essays of June Jordan, the widely acclaimed Black American writer known for her fierce commitment to human rights and political activism. Spanning the length of her extraordinary career, and including her last writings, the essays in this collection reveal Jordan as an incisive analyst of injustice, democracy, and literature. Willing to venture into the most painful contradictions of culture and politics, Jordan comes back with lyrical honesty, wit, and wide-ranging intelligence that resonates sharply to this day.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Civitas Book Publisher
  • Publish Date: Mar 15th, 2003
  • Pages: 320
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.10in - 6.10in - 0.80in - 1.00lb
  • EAN: 9780465036936
  • Categories: Cultural & Ethnic Studies - American - African American & BlWomen's StudiesEssays

About the Author

June Jordan was Professor of African American Studies at U.C. Berkeley and was born in New York City in 1936. Her books of poetry include Haruko / Love Poems and Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems. She was also the author of five children's books, a novel, three plays, and five volumes of political essays, the most recent of which was Affirmative Acts.

For more than ten years, she wrote a regular political column for The Progressive magazine. Her honors included a National Book Award nomination, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, and a National Association of Black Journalists Award. June Jordan died in Berkeley, California on June 14, 2002.

Praise for this book

"These selections offer real riches from Jordan's mind and heart, essays that weigh and assess and which, even after her death, express her resilient credo, 'Not yet/big bird of prey/not yet.'"--Reamy Jansen, San Francisco Chronicle
"A powerful voice...Jordan's life and work is about quintessential American ideals of justice and resistance to tyranny. When rendered from a female African-American point of view that champions the disenfranchised, those ideals take on a special cast...Even in death, she has a voice that is committed and unafraid."--Atlanta Journal Constitution
"Whatever her theme or mode, June Jordan continually delineates the conditions of survival--of the body, and mind, and the heart."--Adrienne Rich
"Insightful...provocative."--New York Times
"A provocative and personal collection of essays from "one of America's fiercest literary figures and social activists...the hope of a generation."--Ms. Magazine
"Astonishingly powerful."--Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive
"Writer, activist, and professor June Jordan's final essay collection serves as a barometer for the last four decades of radical humanitarian thought. Jordan's days were spent in constant revelation. Read her words, risk your own unveiling."--David Mills, The Village Voice
"Jordan makes us think of Akhmatova, of Neruda. She is among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet."--Alice Walker