with a single Black author, poet, historian, personage, or idea for that matter. Nor was I ever assigned a single woman to study as a thinker, or writer, or poet, or life force. Nothing that I learned, here, lessened my feeling of pain or confusion and bitterness as related to my origins: my street, my family, my friends. Nothing showed me how I might try to alter the political and economic realities underlying our Black condition in white America. Due to this disconnect with the predominantly male, white curriculum, Jordan left Barnard without graduating. June Jordan emerged as a poet and political activist when black female authors were beginning to be heard. Personal life At Barnard College, when she was 19, Jordan met Columbia University student Michael Meyer, whom she married in 1955. She subsequently followed her husband to the University of Chicago, where she pursued graduate studies in anthropology. She also enrolled at the university but soon returned to Barnard, where she remained until 1957. In 1958, Jordan gave birth to the couple's only child, Christopher David Meyer. The couple divorced in 1965, and Jordan raised her son alone. After the Harlem Riots of 1964, Jordan found that she was, in her words, "filled with hatred for everything and everyone white." She wrote: From that time on, Jordan wrote with love. She also identified as bisexual in her writing, which she refused to deny, even when this status was stigmatized. Career Jordan's first published book, Who Look at Me (1969), was a collection of poems for children. It was followed by 27 more books in her lifetime, and one (Some of Us Did Not Die: Collected and New Essays) that was in press when she died. Two more have been published posthumously: Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), and the 1970 poetry collection SoulScript, edited by Jordan, has been reissued. She was also an essayist, columnist for The Progressive, novelist, biographer, and librettist for the musical/opera I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, composed by John Adams and produced by Peter Sellars. When asked about the writing process for the libretto of the opera, Jordan said: The composer, John [Adams], said he needed to have the whole libretto before he could begin, so I just sat down last spring and wrote it in six weeks, I mean,