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.
It’s been years since Ellie has fished the Alaskan waters—not since her mother died, not since her father took to drink, and not since the birth of her five-year-old son. She’s been living half a life, working a cubicle job in a small fishing town and drowning in debt while barely having the energy to be a single mom to Drew. When she finds her father lying in an alleyway, she learns he’s done the unforgivable. Pete has gambled away the family legacy, the fishing boat and license, and unless he can come up with fifty thousand in two months, the bookie will get everything, Pete will be homeless and Ellie and her son will be stuck in the grinding cycle of poverty. Ellie agrees to fish the season with her dad, bringing Drew on the boat as they chase the pipe dream of making enough money to pay off the debt. Ellie is used to the 20-hour days and the back-breaking work, and she’s used to risking her life to find the biggest catch. What she’s not used to is accepting help from others, and definitely not from a secretive homesteader who seems to have demons of his own. Ellie’s growing attraction and the dangerous Alaskan waters are the least of her worries, though. Because Ellie is hiding secrets of her own and, as the date with the bookie draws closer, she is at risk of losing it all.