11/21/2020
there are still a few us VS US books and posters by nikita gale available through CLOACA PROJECTS website. all you have to do is make a donation to Black Girls CODE or RestoreJustice.com and email us.
one of the central elements of us VS us is the work of a favorite writer of nikita's , . In Jordan’s poem “Letter to the Local Police,”” Jordan satirically takes up the voice of an insipid suburban resident writing a letter to the police to level a complaint about roses “abiding in perpetual near riot/of wild behavior [and] indiscriminate coloring.”
"One of the most widely-published and highly-acclaimed Jamaican American writers of her generation, poet, playwright and essayist June Jordan was known for her fierce commitment to human rights and political activism. Over a career that produced twenty-seven volumes of poems, essays, libretti, and work for children, Jordan engaged the fundamental struggles of her era: for civil rights, women’s rights, and sexual freedom. A prolific writer across genres, Jordan’s poetry is known for its immediacy and accessibility as well as its interest in identity and the representation of personal, lived experience—her poetry is often deeply autobiographical. Jordan’s work also frequently imagines a radical, globalized notion of solidarity amongst the world’s marginalized and oppressed. In volumes like Some Changes (1971), Living Room (1985) and Kissing God Goodbye: Poems 1991-1997 (1997), Jordan uses conversational, often vernacular English to address topics ranging from family, bisexuality, political oppression, racial identity and racial inequality, and memory. Regarded as one of the key figures in the mid-century American social, political and artistic milieu, Jordan also taught at many of the country’s most prestigious universities including Yale, State University of New York-Stony Brook, and the University of California-Berkeley, where she founded Poetry for the People. Her honors and awards included fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, and the National Association of Black Journalists Award." (poetry foundation website)
