This Unruly Witness: June Jordan's Legacy - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798888904572

Publisher: Haymarket Books, 2025

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Authors

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.

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.

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.

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)

Edition details

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798888904572
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 312
• Editor: Muller Lauren, Thompson Becky, Hill Dominique C., Callier Durell M.