We're on ― A June Jordan Reader

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, born in 1963 and raised in Switzerland, and now living in New York, 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), for which he won the International Lake Constance Prize; and the Swiss best-selling memoir The Best Dancer (Der Beste Tänzer, 2003), which won the Zurich Kantonalbank Schiller Prize and the Puchheim Readers’ Prize. His work as a playwright has also been acclaimed, with productions mounted in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany. Since 2003, Keller’s stories in English appeared in The Paris Review, BOMB, The Means, and Quadrant, among other literary journals.

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