Jordan Wilson-Dalzell
"Writer was the first name I called myself."
About Jordan
Bio
Jordan Dalzell (she/her/they) is a 30-year-old poet living in the Bay Area. Writer was the first name she called herself. Words are her compass. Pre pandemic, she taught spoken word to youth with Bay Area Creative.
She teaches radical social justice to the little ones in her life--striving to infuse her teaching pedagogy with intersectional feminism and teaching through play. Her life centers around activism, supporting grassroots projects and one day creating a school focused on hands-on multi-lingual whole child community-based learning.
In her free time, she spends her time reading, looking up bodies of water, and taking blankets back from her dogs, Lega and Appa (yes, he's named from Avatar and the Last Airbender)
Jordan represented the Santa Cruz Poetry team two years in a row and is also the co-founder of the slam team at her graduate school in California Institute of Integral Studies. She's working on an MFA in poetry in between juggling chronic illness and surviving a pandemic.
Resuscitate
Jordan’s book, Resuscitate, is her first full publication of poetry. The book is a collection of works that tells Jordan’s story of speaking out in order to heal and survive her own trauma. In her own words:
"This book is a testimony for the child I once was. This is witness to our trauma, our survival, our resilience. This is a love letter to you--promising that I am coming back for you, that I will bring you back to our grown-up self, our healing and our healed self-- to show you what you have to look forward to.
You may feel like trauma is your second name, but that will change. Our body and mind can be knitted back together back together even when we feel all we are is dust. My dear, you are too young to be a fossil already, and we are not destined to be found in an ancient sea in a few millennia. We will find ourselves in these poems, these memorials of who we are and were and could've been.
What we can be will be infinite, and one day, you'll hear me calling out your window and you'll follow me to recovery. We will dance our ghosts to rest."
this is a funeral hymn
to the child i once was.
i do not want to bury all of you,
only the parts of you
that are ready to lay down to rest.
-JWD
Contact
Based in Bay Area, CA