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This thirtieth-anniversary edition of June Jordan’s foundational poetry program guidebook features a foreword by Hanif Abdurraqib and a new preface from Samiya Bashir.
If you want to know how to teach poetry—in a university, a high school, at a nature preserve, in a hospital, or in your living room—read this book.
June Jordan's Poetry for the People details how to build a grassroots poetry program through a collection of strategies, sample student work, course descriptions, and a step-by-step guide to organizing and promoting readings, alongside original writing from Adrienne Rich, Joy Harjo, Ntozake Shange, and Cornelius Eady.
Now with a guide to teaching ethically in the digital age, this easy-to-use, timely reference is perfect for teachers of poetry at any level and in any group setting.
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.
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: Lauren Muller, Shanti Bright, Gary Chandler, Ananda Esteva, Sean Lewis, Stephanie Rose, Shelly Smith, Shelly Teves, Rubén Antonio Villalobos, and Pamela Wilson.
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