Branching Out Little Rock: Donna Masini on June Jordan

June Jordan dedicated her book, Passion, “to everybody scared as I used to be,” writing, as she says of Whitman, for the sake of a people’s poetry. Here is a look at the poetry and prose—spanning half a century—of a writer whose passionate, politically engaged poems and commitment to write out of her own “civil wars,” makes her a poet someone once called “a lyric catalyst for change.”

A joint initiative with the Poetry Society of America, Branching Out: Poetry for the 21st Century is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.