June Jordan (1936-2002) was a poet, essayist, journalist, dramatist, activist, and educator known for challenging oppression through her inspirational words and actions. She was the founder of Poetry for the People at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught for many years. The author of over twenty books, her poetry is collected in Directed by Desire; and her selected essays in Some of Us Did Not Die.
Sapphire burst on to the literary scene in 1994 with American Dreams. She is also the author of Black Wings & Blind Angels and Push, which was made into the 2009 award-winning motion picture Precious.
Jan Heller Levi’s first collection of poems, Once I Gazed at You in Wonder, won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, and poems from her second collection, Skyspeak, won The Emily Dickinson Award of the Poetry Society of America. She is the editor of A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, served as consulting editor for the new edition of The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, and is currently writing the biography of Rukeyser. She is also co-editor, with Sara Miles, of Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan. She lives in New York City with her husband, the Swiss novelist and playwright Christoph Keller, and teaches at Hunter College
June Jordan (1936 - 2002) was a poet, activist, journalist, essayist and teacher. Prolific and passionate, she was an influential voice who lived and wrote on the frontlines of American poetry, international political vision and human moral witness. The author of many award-winning books, she traveled widely to read her poems and to proclaim a vision of liberation for all people. Dynamic, rebellious, and courageous, June Jordan was, and still is, a lyrical catalyst for change.
Christoph Keller is the author of numerous prize-winning novels, plays and essays in German, including
Gulp (1988);
I’d Like My Country Flat (
Ich hätte das Land gern flach, 1996); and the Swiss best-selling memoir
The Best Dancer (
Der Beste Tänzer, 2003). Keller and his wife, the American poet Jan Heller Levi, are currently co-writing
Whatever Can Come To A Woman, the first full-length biography of the American poet Muriel Rukeyser, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf.
Jan Heller Levi is the author of three books of poetry,
Once I Gazed at You in Wonder, Skyspeak, and
Orphan. She is the editor of
A Muriel Rukeyser Reader and consulting editor on the 2005 reissue of
The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. She is also coeditor, with Sara Miles, of
Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan. Levi lives in New York City with her husband, the Swiss-born novelist and playwright, Christoph Keller, with whom she is completing a biography of Rukeyser. She teaches at Hunter College.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for The Tradition, Jericho Brown earned his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. He is the recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland. His first book, Please (New Issues), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal. Brown is the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
