Major Jackson

Major Jackson (born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American poet and professor at Vanderbilt University.

Major Jackson was born on September 9, 1968, in Philiadelphia, Pennsylvania, and is son of Levorn Gregory Spann and Gloria Ann Matthews.

Jackson attended a studious Catholic primary school and later attended Central High School in Philadelphia.

He earned degrees from Temple University and the University of Oregon.

Jackson married Kristen Johanson, who is a counselor, in May 2022.

Major Jackson is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.

He is the author of six collections of poetry: Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems 2002-2022 (W.W. Norton, 2023), The Absurd Man (W.W. Norton, 2020), Roll Deep (W.W. Norton, 2015), Holding Company (W.W. Norton, 2010), Hoops (W.W. Norton, 2006), finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature-Poetry, and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia, 2002), winner of the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Award Circle.

From 2002 until 2020, he taught at the University of Vermont as the Richard A. Dennis Professor of English and University Distinguished Professor.

He is a former graduate faculty member of the New York University Creative Writing Program and the Bennington Writing Seminars.

He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.

His poems and essays have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry London, Orion Magazine, The Yale Review, among other fine publications.

His poetry has received critical attention in The Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, World Literature Today, Philadelphia Inquirer, and on National Public Radio's All Things Considered.

This relationship inspired Jackson to write three poetry collections: Leaving Saturn (2002), Hoops (2007), and Holding Company (2012).

Other important role models include Afaa Michael Weaver, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Philip Levine and C. K. Williams.

In many of Jackson's works, he incorporates a theme of praise, as he believes that this praise "affected him most deeply in the works of the earlier generation of African America poets".

Jackson went to Kenya with the mission of extending the literary conversation between Kenya and the United States by working with local writers.

His work has been included in many anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2004 (Scribner, 2004), The Pushcart Prize XXIX: Best of the Small Presses, (W.W. Norton & Company, 2004) Schwerkraft, From the Fishouse (Persea Books, 2009), and The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation (W.W. Norton & Company, 2010).

Major Jackson also became the host of The Slowdown, a podcast that selects a poem and reflects on it in a five to ten minute episode.

A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, his awards include a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Award, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and a Witter Bynner Fellowship in conjunction with the Library of Congress.

He also served as poet-in-residence at The Frost Place, creative arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College.

Jackson was interested "in his sense of the ethical obligation we have to the communities we claim".

He believed that communities must work together to maintain a bond - one of the many themes in his "Urban Renewal" series.

While at Temple University, Jackson formed a relationship with Sonia Sanchez, his first creative-writing professor, who he claims is "responsive for his embrace of poetry".

His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America's Countee Cullen: Collected Poems.

His prose is published in A Beat Beyond: Selected Prose of Major Jackson (University of Michigan, 2022).

He is host of the podcast The Slowdown.