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J

Jackson, Major (1968– )
The product of urban North Philadelphia, where
he was born in 1968, Major Jackson is a graduate
of Temple University. From the appearance of his
first book, Leaving Saturn (2001), to the present,
Jackson has been lauded for his poetic genius. He
was immediately showered with accolades. CAL-
LALOO included him in its emerging writers issue.
He won the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and
the Whitting Writer’s Award, which is given annu-
ally to “emerging writers of exceptional talent and
promise.” His many other fellowships and awards
include inclusion in the Bread Loaf Writers’ Con-
ference, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a Library of
Congress Witter Bynner Fellowship, and a National
Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. Jackson also
earned an M.F.A. from the University of Oregon.
His work has been published in American Poetry
Review, Boulevard, and The New Yorker.
Much in the way that JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN,
in his Homewood Trilogy, gives voice to the urban
Pittsburgh community in which he grew up, Jack-
son brings to life the world he knew intimately
growing up in North Philadelphia. From the out-
side, this world might look like the bombed-out
residue of war and urban renewal. However, like
GWENDOLYN BROOKS, who created the fictional
world Bronzeville, where real people live real,

complex, credible lives, Jackson lifts the veil cast

over his seldom entered North Philadelphia world

to reveal a pulsating world of pain and joy, lives

destroyed and lives fulfilled, and lives of despair

and lives of hope. In his work Jackson not only

pays attention to the lives of the people he grew up

knowing but also teaches us “How to Listen,” the

title of one of his poems:

I am going to cock my head tonight like a

dog

in front of McGlinchys Tavern on Locust;

I am going to pay attention to our lives.

From 1992 to 1999, Jackson was the literary arts

curator of the Painted Bride Art Center in Phila-

delphia. He is an associate professor of English at

the University of Vermont and a member of the

low-residency M.F.A. creative writing program at

Queens College in Charlotte, North Carolina.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gabbin, Joanne V., ed. Furious Flower: African Ameri-

can Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the

Present. Charlottesville: University of Virginia

Press, 2004.

Wilfred D. Samuels