Major Jackson

Major Jackson earned a B.S. from Temple University and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Oregon. He currently is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.

"If there is a conflict going on in the world, I don’t go to the newspapers. I try and find who the poets are in that region, chiefly because they are going to give me a portrait of the inner life of people outside of the conflict that may define or shape how we view them. I also feel like poets carry a history, carry a spirit, carry a sense of cultural knowledge that I could learn from. You don’t get that in the nightly news."

— Excerpt from Oral Memoirs of Rebecca Major Jackson,
Baylor University Institute for Oral History

Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, including Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (2023), The Absurd Man (2020), Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006), and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. He also is the author of A Beat Beyond: The Selected Prose of Major Jackson (2022(. His edited volumes include Best American Poetry 2019 and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems.

Jackson is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, John S. Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. In addition to being honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress, Jackson is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves as the poetry editor of The Harvard Review