Major Jackson

Major Jackson (born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American poet and professor 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. 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). From 2023 to 2025, he served as host of the award-winning podcast The Slowdown.

Life Major Jackson was born on September 9, 1968, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Jackson attended a studious Catholic primary school and later attended Central High School. He earned degrees from Temple University and the University of Oregon. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review. His work has been included in many anthologies including The Best American Poetry (Scribner), The Pushcart Prize XXIX: Best of the Small Presses, (W.W. Norton & Company) Schwerkraft, From the Fishouse (Persea Books), 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.

Honors and awards 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,

He was a member of the Dark Room Collective.

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.

Poetry collections

Prose collections