Major Jackson

Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, including Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (Blue Flower Arts, 2023), The Absurd Man (W.W. Norton & Company, 2020), Roll Deep (W.W. Norton & Company, 2015), Holding Company (W.W. Norton & Company, 2010), Hoops (W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia Press, 2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. Jackson’s edited volumes include Best American Poetry 2019 (Scribner), Renga for Obama (Harvard Review Monographs, 2017), and the Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems (2013). He is also the author of A Beat Beyond: Selected Prose of Major Jackson, edited by Amor Kohli (University of Michigan Press, 2022). 

A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major Jackson was awarded a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Award and received honors from the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion magazine, the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry magazine, Poetry London, and ZYZZYVA. 

Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He hosts The Slowdown podcast, a partnership between the Poetry Foundation and American Public Media, and is poetry editor of the Harvard Review.