If we are to understand the complexities of the human experience, it is the poet who is best able to articulate, to bear witness — not only as archivists, but as social and creative provocateurs for the sake of society or a communal experience. In reading “This Unruly Witness: June Jordan’s Legacy,” an anthology of writing about poet, essayist, professor and activist June Jordan’s work edited by Lauren Muller, Becky Thompson, Dominique C. Hill and Durrell M. Callier that features literary luminaries like Angela Davis, Naomi Shihab Nye and E. Ethelbert Miller, I was reminded the poet is undefeated, as she sees everything that we as a society do not or refuse to acknowledge.

When June Jordan died in 2002, I was being reborn into the world of literature after a five-year prison stint inside

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