-June Jordan

June Jordan was born in Harlem to Jamaican immigrant parents and raised in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. She went on to become one of the most influential voices in African American literature and feminist theory of the twentieth century. In her 1980 book Passion, she included the essay “For the Sake of a People’s Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us.” In the essay, she identifies herself as “a descendant of Walt Whitman” and claims a place “within the Whitman tradition” for “Black and Third World Poets,” a tradition that she defines as, at its very best, representative of an “egalitarian sensibility.” Like Langston Hughes before her, Jordan claimed, “we, too, go on singing this America.”