On Angela Jackson: A True Daughter of the Great Migration
Angela Jackson’s imaginative writing elaborates on Chicago’s powerful mix of aspiration and desperation, especially on the part of Black Americans—those who made their way to the city during the Great Migration and those living in the legacy of that journey. Jackson, born July 25, 1951, in Greenville, Mississippi, is a true daughter of the Great Migration, and she expresses the lived and mythic experiences of that legacy in her seven poetry collections (full-length books and chapbooks), her many plays, and her novel, Where I Must Go (2009). Since 1971, she has built an extraordinary and necessary oeuvre from an education mixing the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) with her MA from University of Chicago and an MFA from Bennington College. At OBAC, Jackson found mentors such as Carolyn M. Rodgers, Jeff Donaldson, and Hoyt W. Fuller, who became lifelong advocates for her work.
Jackson’s poetry has received great recognition, starting with the Conrad Kent Rivers Memorial Award in 1973 to the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2002. Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners (1993) received the Carl Sandburg Award and It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time (2015) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Her beloved and bedeviled Chicago remains her greatest muse and it is fitting that she was named Illinois poet laureate in 2021, a post that was once held by Gwendolyn Brooks, whom she chronicled in A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun (2017), an important literary biography. The importance of African diasporic sensibilities comes through in Jackson’s innovative use of myth, particularly in the “Wishbone Wish” section of her 2022 collection, More Than Meat and Raiment. Receiving the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, one of America’s most prestigious literary awards, is a fitting honor for a poet who in an elegy says:
I am a memory borrower, brothers and sisters.
I will keep you safe and sacred. I am a keeper.
I can take up where you left off.
—From “The Memory Borrower”
Arkansas born and raised, and a resident of New York City for more than four decades, Patricia Spears Jones is a poet, educator, cultural activist, and anthologist. She is the author of The Beloved Community (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), A Lucent Fire: New & Selected Poems (2015), Painkiller (2010), Femme du Monde (2006), and The Weather That Kills (1995). She is also the author of five chapbooks, …