Major Jackson

Major Jackson is the author of five collections of poetry: The Absurd Man (Norton: 2020), Roll Deep (Norton: 2015), winner of the 2016 Vermont Book Award and hailed in the New York Times Book Review as “a remixed Odyssey,” Holding Company (Norton: 2010), Hoops (Norton: 2006) and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia: 2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems, and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the editor of Best American Poetry 2019, The Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems and Renga for Obama: An Occasional Poem.  His poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, The New York Times among other fine literary publications. He frequently gives lectures and readings throughout the United States, and recently in Africa, Europe, and Asia.  His poems have been translated into several languages including Chinese, German, Italian and Spanish.  A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, he has been awarded a Whiting Writers’ Award and honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. A former arts administrator, he served as Finance Director of the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia. He is currently a trustee of the Vermont Arts Council and previously served on the boards of the Vermont Humanities Council, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Robert Frost Place. Major Jackson lives in South Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Richard A. Dennis Professor of English and University Distinguished Professor at the University of Vermont. He curates the Painted Word Poetry Series and serves as the poetry editor of The Harvard Review. (Photo credit: Erin Patrice O’Brien.)