June Jordan’s Poetry for the People (Expanded Edition)

A new edition of this classic collection of essays from June Jordan’s influential poetry workshops, designed to bring poetry back to the people, featuring a foreword by Hanif Abdurraqib and an introduction by Samiya Bashir

First published in 1995, June Jordan's Poetry for the People describes how to build a grassroots poetry program in your classroom, living room, or local cafe. This peek at student work and instant classics by influential poets such as US poet laureate Joy Harjo will inspire people young and old to become practicing poets.

Poetry for the People celebrates explorative poetry as a communal, oral art form. With clear strategies for how to critique poems and facilitate a poetry workshop discussion, this easy-to-use, timely reference is perfect for self-taught writers, groups of friends and teachers of poetry at any level from colleges to public libraries, university writers' centers to community-based workshops from prisons to bookstores.

The book features essays by Adrienne Rich and Joy Harjo, as well as interviews with June’s contemporaries Ntozake Shange, Leroy Quintana, Alfred Arteaga, Janice Gould, Dan Bellm, and Marilyn Chin, who comment on the canon. It also includes bibliographies of multicultural poetry, gay and lesbian poetry, deaf poetry, and poetry for and by children. June Jordan's Poetry for the People testifies to the group spirit that made her poetry workshops so powerful.

June Jordan was a courageous agitator for change, writing with love and rage at the front lines of American poetry and of injustice on an international scale. She gained renown as both an essayist and political writer, penning a regular column for the Progressive. Jordan was the founder of the Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley and the recipient of a congressional citation for her outstanding contributions to literature, the progressive movement, and the civil rights movement. Her 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 among the world’s marginalized and oppressed. 

The Blueprint Collective is Lauren Muller, Shanti Bright, Gary Chandler, Ananda Esteva, Sean Lewis, Stephanie Rose, Shelly Smith, Shelly Teves, Rubén Antonio Villalobos, and Pamela Wilson.

Hanif Abdurraqib, a New York Times bestselling author is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His work has been published widely in major venues including The FADER, Pitchfork, and The New Yorker. Abdurraqib’s books have been finalists for or winners of the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Lenore Marshall Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. His most recent book is There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. Hanif is a graduate of Beechcroft High School. 

Samiya Bashir is a poet, writer, librettist, and performer whose work has been widely published and viewed from Berlin to the United States. Formerly the June Jordan Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, she has served as Visiting Professor of Poetry for the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. Bashir lives in Harlem. Her fourth collection, I Hope this Helps, was released by Nightboat Books to wide acclaim in 2025. Her honors include the Rome Prize in Literature, the Pushcart Prize, Oregon’s Arts & Culture Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature, plus numerous other awards, grants, fellowships, and residencies.

Publication date: October 13, 2026

Inaction Is Death: A new foreword by Hanif Abdurraqib
Introduction: Still Building the House We Need

INTRODUCTION (1995) by June Jordan

Part One: TEACHING AND WRITING A NOW! BREED OF POETRY
PERSONAL AND POLITICAL POWER IN POETRY
BUILDING A COMMUNITY OF TRUST WITHIN A POETRY WORKSHOP
REFLECTIONS ON TEACHING: Power Tripping, Responsibility, and Authority 
RESCUING THE CANON: Reinventing and Making It Relevant Again
ALLITERATIVE SQUAT THRUSTS: A Syllabus and Some Exercises for Writing Poetry

Part Two: TAKING POETRY BACK TO THE PEOPLE
WORD OF MOUTH: Staging a Revolutionary Reading
PUBLICITY AND THE MEDIA
REACHING INWARD AND OUTWARD THROUGH
THROWING IT DOWN (ON PAPER. IN A BOOK)
A Fantabulous Collection of Poems: POEMS FROM POETRY FOR THE PEOPLE, 1991–1994

RADIANT RAGE: SERVICE, LINEAGE, AND THE MAKING OF A POETIC LIFE by Samiya Bashir
A COMMUNITY LESSON by Samiya Bashir