“For All The Grief We Know and Meet With”: Finding June Jordan in the Alice Walker Archive

Isaiah Frost Rivera (He/They) is a PhD candidate in the African and African Diaspora Studies program at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include queer and trans Afrodiasporic expressive cultures, with a focus on grief and horror. Isaiah is a 2025-2026 recipient of Rose Library’s African American history and culture short term fellowship.

In the summer of 2025, I was awarded an African American History and Culture Fellowship in order to explore the papers of black bisexual writer, poet, and womanist icon Alice Walker in the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. My dissertation, entitled “Black Queer Grief: Diasporic Death Consciousness in the Digital Age,” excavates black queer mourning practices and the artists whose works most embody its ontological force, from the canonical writings of black queer women writers like Audre Lorde and June Jordan who battled breast cancer, to the genre-blurring cinemas of ancestral loss produced by black queer directors like Cheryl Dunye and Isaac Julien. Chief among this lineage are the works of Alice Walker, whose archive I approached with the methodological surety that her words would reveal to me new, uncharted expressions of grief to bolster my project’s canonical aspirations. What I did not anticipate, however, were the stirring reflections of another black bisexual poet and guiding light whose work has just as irrevocably shaped Black American culture: June Jordan.

While I have been intimately aware of Alice Walker’s work since reading The Color Purple for the first time when I was 13 years old, I was first introduced to June Jordan while attending a 2019 writing workshop run by novelist Alejandro Heredia, during which he asked us in our introductory session to respond to Jordan’s “Poem about My Rights.” I remember sitting down to read this piece for the first time and feeling as though a sharp wind had blown through the room, unlatching my skin from my skeleton, laying me bear. Here was a poetic voice I recognized totally as if it were plucked directly from my mind, yet one so singular in its rousing excision that it could have only come from another galaxy. From that moment on, I knew that June Jordan was a force to be reckoned with, and now, having read the better part of her oeuvre, my scholarship is indebted to her fierce resolve. Imagine my pleasant surprise, then, upon discovering a plethora of materials directly relating to Jordan in the Alice Walker papers’ finding aid, including years-long correspondence between the two, recommendation letters, photographs, and notebook entries, all confirming the depth of their sisterly bond.

During my brief time at the Rose Library, I encountered more archival artifacts than can be relayed in a short blog post, but among them, three stand out. The first is a recommendation letter for June Jordan by Alice Walker (see Fig. 1), one of several Walker preserved throughout her papers. In this undated document (likely written in the 80s) found in Box 1, Folder 3 of the archive, Walker describes Jordan as “an extraordinary person, poet, writer and teacher (and now playwright!)” and “a friend and highly valued colleague” of many years whose work displays “a passionate commitment to truth and justice that makes her seem several times as large and tall as she is.” Walker, one of the select few included in “The Sisterhood,” a group of black women writers like Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Ntozake Shange, has always displayed a vested interested in cultivating community with other black women writers, so it comes as no surprise to find such a recommendation among her archival records. However, keeping her friendship with Jordan in mind, this document stands out due to its affective potency and formal brevity—in just five concise sentences, Walker beautifully evokes her decades-long relationship with a fellow black queer writer who, according to one of her notebook entries, she considered “a friend [and] sister” for whom she had “great respect and love for [her] life . . . and work” (see Notebook [19], Box 36, Folder 8)—a shared veneration between the two which not only shaped their enduring friendship but also fundamentally defines their archival encounters.

The second artifact I would like to highlight is a poignant letter from June Jordan to Alice Walker written on November 30, 1973, located in Box 4, Folder 8 (see Fig. 2). During my visit, I encountered countless letters from Jordan to Walker throughout the 70s and 80s which varied in length, topic, and tone, but all were consistently imbued with love, respect, and reverence. This particular letter stands out among the pack for a few reasons. For one, it provides a rare window into the mind of a writer engaging with another writer’s work in real time, as Jordan documents her immediate late-night reactions to finishing Zora Neale Hurston’s canonical work Their Eyes Were Watching God, confiding that the book left her “in echo” and “in a state of shock” because “the purpose of her [Hurston’s] craft, and even the nature of it, so closely resembles my own understanding of my work”—a feeling I, too, felt upon my first encounter with Jordan’s own work.  Another reason this letter stands out is its structural abandon, written in stream-of-consciousness style broken up into several sections that touch on topics such as women’s writings, grief, and solitude. Following her thoughts on Hurston’s novel, Jordan describes the unsettling feelings her last encounter with Walker uncovered, stating:

You made me feel an enormous grief — which is hard to think beyond. But that will happen, I guess, and will be a movement ahead . . . I guess a difference between us lies in what paralyzes or bestirs each of us: I am immobilized by grief, and have to get beyond, usually, by putting away the reasons for grief, at least as the conscious focus for my undertaking. So, instead, I write my anger or my dream — my rage or my plan — for a way, a way around the reasons for all the grief we know and meet with.

Here, Jordan utilizes the language of grief to articulate her troubled consciousness, an underlying condition she struggles to express on its own terms and, thus, resorts to alternative affective registers—anger, speculation, a way around—to circumvent, as she so movingly writes, the grief each of us knows and is met with. Later, contemplating “all the love and all the violence and all the everything this small house has held in its frail frame,” Jordan asks, “What and who shall I save myself for?”, shifting to the “absurdly grave discussion” of self-annihilation, as she contemplates the notion that “suicide is not a surrender, as it were, to enemies/enemy factors” but instead “another possibility, per se, of relative calm, since one cannot predict/calculate the experience.” Notably written 1973, nearly a decade following Jordan’s mother’s death by suicide in 1965, an event she would later describe in her 1985 essay collection On Call: Political Essays as the catalyst for her black feminist ethic, this letter provides an invaluable window into the mind of an author who, after years of battling cancer, grew intimately aware with death and loss, yet whose work never strayed from her commitment to hope, peace, and justice for all.

The third artifact I offer is perhaps the most straightforward, yet one which, much like Walker’s recommendation, contains in its simplicity an affective potency that cannot be understated. It is a photograph of Walker and Jordan at the 1997 National Black Gay and Lesbian Forum in Long Beach, California (see Fig. 3), in which the two embrace, smiling brightly. At once symbolizing Walker and Jordan’s friendship, their commitment to black queer expression, and their continued preservation in the annals of American history, this image, one of the last artifacts I encountered during my visit, deeply affected me upon discovering it and continues to move me. In a post-truth, AI-addled world where the validity of images is increasingly at risk, it is no small feat to find an archival photograph of two people in loving community whose work transformed black letters in the late 20^th century. Considering, too, that Jordan died in 2002, in the longstanding archive of black queer grief that persists today, Walker’s preservation of Jordan’s presence throughout her archive reiterates the importance of black queer mourning as memory-work, for remembering those we have lost is part and parcel of our collective liberation.

From the archival discoveries I have catalogued herein to my pleasant encounters, however fleeting, with other like-minded researchers including visual artist Jewel Ham and actress Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, my 2025 Rose Library visit was a deeply stimulating experience, but the work is not done. There are countless more archival treasures to be gleaned from the Alice Walker collection, and so I encourage other scholars to continue excavating their offerings, sharing their insights, and, like Walker herself, exhuming those graves.