Major Jackson

Poet Major Jackson is professor of English, director of creative writing, and holder of the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.

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 a Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. He is the author of A Beat Beyond: The Selected Prose of Major Jackson edited by Amor Kohli.

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

Jackson is a recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. He has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Writers’ Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress.

Jackson’s poems and essays have been published in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry London and many distinguished journals. He also serves as the poetry editor of The Harvard Review and host of the poetry podcast, The Slowdown.