The definitive selected essays of the revolutionary writer and activist June Jordan, the first publication in an ambitious program to reissue her long out-of-print work.

NOTHING LESS THAN LOVE: The Selected Essays of June Jordan
Edited and introduced by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Penguin Classics, Spring 2027
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

Known in her time as the most widely published African American writer to date, June Jordan was a courageous agitator for change, writing with love and rage at the frontlines of literature and injustice on an international scale. A contemporary of Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, she received a congressional citation for her outstanding contributions to literature, the progressive movement, and the civil rights movement.

And yet Jordan knew that she never got her due within her lifetime. She was too fiery, too fierce in her political commitments to be embraced and lauded by the establishment. In the years after her untimely death in 2001, her remarkable work largely fell out of print. Yet it is the very fierceness and foresight of Jordan’s commitment to freedom and human dignity that has fueled a recent, international upsurge of interest in her work. NOTHING LESS THAN LOVE will be the first in a major reissue program from Penguin Classics in the US.

Edited by the celebrated poet and Black feminist scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and timed to coincide with the first biography of Jordan (also by Gumbs) for Yale University Press, this definitive selected essays includes hugely influential treatises alongside lesser known gems, all organized around the power of Jordan’s unyielding commitment to love.

“In political journalism that cuts like razors, in essays that blast the darkness of confusion with relentless light … [June Jordan] has comforted, explained, described, wrestled with, taught and made us laugh out loud before we wept… I am talking about a span of forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art.” —Toni Morrison

June Jordan (1936 – 2002) became, in her lifetime, the most published Black poet in American history. Known for her fierce commitment to human rights and political activism, she founded the Poetry for the People program at U.C. Berkeley and received, among many honors, a congressional citation for her outstanding contributions to literature, the progressive movement and the civil rights movement.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the author of Survival is a Promise, the biography of Audre Lorde (FSG, 2024), a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year, Guardian Book of the Week, and a finalist for the LA Times Book Award. She is a 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize Winner in Poetry, and a 2022 Whiting Award Winner in Nonfiction.