June Jordan

A photograph of June Jordan

June Jordan was a powerhouse poet, activist, journalist, and educator. One of the most widely-published and highly-acclaimed writers of her time, Jordan was active in the civil rights, feminist, antiwar, and gay and lesbian rights movements. Through her poetry, essays, plays, and children’s literature, she spoke passionately about race, class, sexuality, and political struggles around the world.

Jordan was born in Harlem in 1936, the child of Jamaican immigrants who raised her in Bedford-Stuyvesant. A gifted student, she began writing poetry in elementary school. She attended boarding school in New England, where her teachers encouraged her writing but never shared the work of any Black writers with her. After earning a BA from Barnard College, Jordan began teaching at the City College of New York in 1966. She published her first book of poetry, Who Look at Me, in 1969. She went on to teach at Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, before becoming Professor of African-American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she founded Poetry For the People.

Jordan’s essays were published in magazines and newspapers around the world. She also published more than twenty-five major works of poetry, fiction, and children’s books before her death in 2002. In an interview shortly before her death, Jordan said that “the task of a poet of color, a black poet, as a people hated and despised, is to rally the spirit of your folks…I have to get myself together and figure out an angle, a perspective, that is an offering, that other folks can use to pick themselves up, to rally and to continue or, even better, to jump higher, to reach more extensively in solidarity with even more varieties of people to accomplish something. I feel that it’s a spirit task.”

Jordan’s books of poetry include the collections Kissing God Goodbye: Poems, 1991-1997, Haruko/Love Poems, Naming Our Destiny, Living Room: New Poems 1980-1984, and Things That I Do in the Dark. Her essay collections include Affirmative Acts: Political Essays, June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint, Technical Difficulties, and Civil Wars: Selected Essays 1963-1980.

You can access several online, full text works by Jordan in the City Tech Collection, including:

Life as Activism: June Jordan’s Writings from the Progressive

Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan.

Coded Bias Screening Wednesday, May 12 at 1:00PM

The library is hosting a free virtual screening of the award-winning film Coded Bias, on Wednesday, May 12th at 1:00PM, open to City Tech faculty and students. Coded Bias, directed by Shalini Kantayya, explores the work of Joy Buolamwini, a MIT Media lab researcher who discovers that facial recognition does not “see” dark-skinned faces. The film documents Buolamwini’s effort to advocate for the ban of technological bias and algorithms. The documentary film was released in 2020 and has a running time of 83 minutes.

You can register here: http://cityte.ch/codedbias using your City Tech email address.

For more information, you can contact Prof. Junior Tidal, Library Department – jtidal@citytech.cuny.edu

Official Site

National Poetry Month: Yes, you can borrow these books!

April is national poetry month and if our campus library was open, I’d pick out some of my favorite books from our collection and some of new poetry books that I haven’t had a chance to read yet. I’d put them on a little tiered shelf in the front of the library with a sign that says:

Yes, you can borrow these books!

And I hope you would.

A lot of people think that poetry isn’t their thing but I usually think they probably just haven’t found a poem they really like yet.

Some of the poems that have meant the most to me have been poems that I’ve come across when I needed them, or that have helped me understand something about myself or the world. There are a few poems that I return to often. There’s a poem that I read when I’m sad and a poem for when I am nervous. There’s one I read when I can’t fall asleep. There’s this poem, by one of my former poetry teachers at Brooklyn College, which reminds me of my hometown. There’s this poem that I’ve read a million times that I love and still don’t fully understand.

There’s this video of the poet L.S. Asekoff (another former teacher of mine) reading a poem called Sparrow at a bar in Brooklyn that no longer exists that makes me think of all of the other places in New York that don’t exist.

And I usually read the Preface to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855 edition) on my birthday.

This is my favorite part:

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. . . .

This year instead of a display in the library, I thought I’d highlight a few online spaces where you can read and listen to poems (and watch videos of people reading). Here is also a link to a database of small presses that publish work by new and emerging writers and a link to Small Press Distribution where you can buy affordable books that support these presses.

Segue online reading series (videos)

Electronic Poetry Center

Penn Sound Poetry Archives (audio)

Poetry Project House Party (digital performance and publications…and also writing prompts)

New Bilingual Library Tutorials

This post was co-authored by City Tech Students and Library College Assistants Maria Barales and Ivette Perez.

We are glad to announce that we have new Bilingual Tutorials available to support students doing research!! We have translated and captioned several YouTube tutorials from English to Spanish to provide students another language option they may feel more comfortable with and to accommodate our large Hispanic/Latinx population here at City Tech. 

Our team at the library are currently creating more bilingual tutorials and resources to assist students!

One of the tutorials animated and translated by our library college assistant, Maria Barales, was the “Annotated Bibliography” tutorial.

Check out the “Annotated Bibliography” tutorial here:

Maria was not only able to translate the tutorial, but as a Communication Design major, she was also able to add animation! Maria followed a script in english and translated it into Spanish and created graphics from scratch using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Then she imported all graphics into Adobe After Effects to animate it which was challenging. Maria used recorded audio of her sister narrating the tutorial in Spanish and had to make sure the pacing of the animation and what she was saying was synched with the animated video. For the last step, Maria transferred the animated tutorial into Premiere and exported it as an mp4 and uploaded it to the City Tech Library YouTube channel.

Another tutorial we translated was our “Citation Vacation” webcomic which details the importance of citing your sources and shows how students can navigate the citation process. Our library college assistant, Ivette Perez, translated the entire webcomic into Spanish.

Check out the “Citation Vacation” tutorial here:

Both Maria and Ivette have also worked to add Spanish captioning to several other video tutorials and have created Spanish transcripts for the City Tech Stories podcast.

When approaching translating, it can be very difficult as Spanish consists of many different dialects and many English words do not translate well into Spanish. It’s important to also take into consideration that common English words are also not as common in the Spanish language and to try to find work-arounds for the language barrier. 
Check out our YouTube channel for more tutorials!

April 8: Preprint Repositories: Taking Control of Our Work

This event is April 8 @ 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm

The LACUNY Scholarly Communications Roundtable and Junior Faculty Research Roundtable would like to welcome all CUNY faculty, staff, and students to our joint event on community-owned preprint repositories! 

Illustration of the role of preprints

Preprint Repositories: Taking Control of Our Work
Date: Thursday, April 8, 2021
Time: 3:30-5:00pm

Public demand for scholarly research skyrocketed in 2020, as people sought reliable and readily available information on COVID-19. Much of this need was met by preprints, scholarly papers that are released publicly prior to peer review and publication in a scholarly journal.

Many major preprint services have been bought by large corporations and are no longer run by members of the scholarly community. In response to this trend, our speakers describe what it means to run a community-owned repository for preprints.

Juan Pablo Alperin is the Associate Faculty Director of Research for the Public Knowledge Project, an initiative developing open source software for scholarly publishing. He will discuss PKP’s new Open Preprint Systems software, which helps localized repository managers share preprints.

Vicky Rampin is a co-founder of LISSA, the LIS Scholarship Archive, a disciplinary repository for library and information science scholarship. She will discuss the archive’s recent departure from the Center for Open Science in favor of a platform supporting community-owned infrastructure.

Register for this event

Image by SciELO. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.