Angela Jackson

Angela Jackson (born July 25, 1951) is an American poet, playwright, and novelist based in Chicago, Illinois. Jackson has been a member of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), a community that fosters the intellectual development of Black creators, since 1970. She has held teaching positions at Kennedy-King College, Columbia College Chicago, Framingham State University, and Howard University. Jackson has won numerous awards, including the American Book Award, and became the fifth Illinois Poet Laureate in 2020.

Biography

Childhood/early life Angela Jackson was born in Greenville, Mississippi, the fifth of nine children. She grew up in the Englewood neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, where her father, George Jackson Sr., and mother, Angeline Robinson Jackson, moved during the Great Migration. She was raised as a Catholic. As a child, Jackson regularly read books from Chicago's Hiram Kelly Branch library. She worked as an editor of Nommo, the OBAC's journal publication. It was during Jackson's time at Northwestern that she decided not to pursue a medical career but, instead, a writing career. She won an Academy of American Poets Award from Northwestern in 1974.

In 1977, Jackson graduated with a B.A. in English and American Literature from Northwestern. During the announcement that Jackson was selected as the 2020 Illinois Poet Laureate, the previous Poet Laureate, Kevin Stein, affirmed that Jackson's “lines bristle with the melody of conversation and soulful blues.”

Awards and accolades Jackson has won various awards for her writing.

Additional awards

The Carl Sandburg Award Chicago Literary Hall of Fame Fuller Award Chicago Sun-Times Friends of Literature Book of the Year Award Six Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, five for fiction and one for poetry Illinois Center for the Book Heritage Award Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent from Chicago State University National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council Awards TriQuarterly's Daniel Curley Award

Works While Jackson has received the most praise for her poetry, she has also published other forms of writing, such as plays, novels, and a memoir.

Poetry Voodoo Love Magic, 1974 The Greenville Club, 1977 Solo in the Boxcar Third Floor, 1985 The Man with the White Liver, 1987 Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners, 1993 And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems New and Selected, 1997 It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time, 2015 More Than Meat and Raiment, 2022

Plays Witness!, 1970 Shango Diaspora: An African American Myth of Womanhood and Love, 1980 Comfort Stew, 1984 (Also known as When the Wind Blows)

Novels Treemont Stone, 1984 Where I Must Go, 2009 Roads, Where There Are No Roads, 2017

Memoir Apprenticeship in the House of Cowrie Shells