
A collection of bold and tender writing on June Jordan's multidimensional legacy as a poet, healer, and activist.
This Unruly Witness was curated for people who see love as a life force, who seek a community that can sustain us, who know that "we are the ones we have been waiting for." Celebrating the life and legacy of the poet activist June Jordan, this collection illuminates why we need Jordan more than ever.
Featuring a foreword by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, an afterword from Imani Perry, essays, poems, letters, and interviews from internationally acclaimed poets and thinkers such as Angela Davis, Pratibha Parmar, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Naomi Shihab Nye, Afaa M. Weaver, E. Ethelbert Miller, and many other people touched by Jordan's work.
Lauren Muller (1959-2023) was chosen by June Jordan to edit the collectively-inspired June Jordan's Poetry for the People. Muller, the Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies at City College of San Francisco, also coedited Reckonings: Contemporary Short Fiction by Native American Women.
Dominique C. Hill, an assistant professor of women's studies at Colgate University, is a qualitative researcher and body archivist studying Black girlhood and Black queer resistance.
alexis pauline gumbs created the June Jordan Saturday Survival School and the Juneteenth Freedom Academy in Durham, North Carolina, where she co-creates a living library of Black LGBTQ Feminist Brilliance called the Mobile Homecoming Trust with her partner Sangodare. gumbs won the Whiting Award in Nonfiction for Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press, 2020), and is a National Humanities Center Fellow, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, and author of Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2024)
Becky Thompson is a scholar, poet, activist, and author of poetry collections To Speak in Salt and Zero Is the Whole I Fall into at Night.
Durell M. Callier is an artist-scholar who documents the lived experiences of Black youth and their communities, examining how Black art and creative practices subvert and reimagine Black life in the face of violence.
"June Jordan was an insurgent intellectual giant of her time and ours. But she was more than that. She was a principled Black left feminist internationalist voice in solidarity with Palestine and in defense of LGBTQ justice at a time when many others were quiet. Her words were companions to her actions. Jordan's clarity, courage and steadfastness were matched only by the eloquence of her poetry and prose. This Unruly Witness with its stellar roster of editors and contributors reminds us of Jordan's powerful influence at a time when we all need to stand boldly and staunchly in her tradition." --Barbara Ransby, author, activist and historian
"Through poignant, funny, and searing reflections by so many who walked alongside Jordan, this collection offers readers of Jordan's work a living portrait of a great American poet."
--Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, author of Something About Living
"If you do not know this poet, no matter how many material possessions you amass--you are impoverished."
--Regie Gibson, Massachusetts Poet Laureate
"For June, the struggle ultimately was about and in the service of love. The ways this book allows both to coexist is impressive."
--Cornelius Eady, author of Brutal Imagination