Civil Wars: A Wide-Ranging and Brilliant Report from the Front Lines of America by June Jordan

This was the second book I got while I was in Birmingham a few weeks back. I grabbed this first within my first few steps in the store because I saw June Jordan’s name. It was finally something familiar in a foreign, Southern city. I’d read her poetry collection Things I Do in the Dark and her novel His Own Where and knew her well enough to know to get anything with her name on it lol. Civil Wars actually mentions both of those books too in the narrative of things. The whole book is a collection of essays, plus her explaining how and why these certain pieces came to be. Reasons like: no one black was reviewing her book, she started teaching at a university, she ran a writing group for kids. Sometimes I wished her narratives before the essays explaining what was going on could have been longer. That voice was helpful and informed. It was her now, writing the book, looking at her writing. I really liked what Jordan wrote about the validity of black English, her teaching philosophy and ex