Major Jackson

Biography

Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, including Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (Norton, 2023), The Absurd Man (Norton, 2020), Roll Deep (Norton, 2015), Holding Company (Norton, 2010), Hoops (Norton, 2006), and Leaving Saturn (Georgia UP, 2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by 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, the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. Jackson is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University and serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review.

http://www.majorjackson.com/

See Work

POETRY / Fall 2016

The Flâneur Tends a Well-Liked Summer Cocktail

By Major Jackson

curbside on an Arp-like table. He’s alone
of course, in the arts district as it were, legs folded, 
swaying a foot so that his body seems to summon 
some deep immensity from all that surrounds:

POETRY / Winter 2012

Security Briefing, II

By Major Jackson

“As you can see the camps are overpopulated,
and the small parts in between, if somebody
vanishes, getting to them is like a reunion date
POETRY / Winter 2012

The Royal Mara

By Major Jackson

The UNHCR Somali driver speeds by a small herd
of white cattle prodded along by a desert farmer.
rust-colored dust in its wake clouds barbed-
POETRY / Winter 2012

Food Distribution Point Tour, Ifo

By Major Jackson

Over a tundra of red sand they arrive eager as stadium
fans, with laundry-like sacks and bags, separated into queues:
POETRY / Winter 2012

Child Soldier, I

By Major Jackson

“When they came to camp, they asked my friend Abdi
if he was ready to join the militia. He said, no.
POETRY / Winter 2012

Return

By Major Jackson

They told you that their enemies surrounded
the women, the countless rapes fifteen miles
from the border, even on the outskirts around
POETRY / Winter 2012

Security Briefing, I

By Major Jackson

“Another main concern or risk that we face apart
from civil unrest is the threat of banditry,
mainly between Dadaab and Liboi, by far
POETRY / Winter 2012

Against Apathy

By Major Jackson

In the placid lean of an arid summer, in the lingering
snarl of pit latrines, the sharp barbs of the acacia,
in the opaque eyes of the girl whose fingers frenzy
POETRY / Winter 2012

Child Soldier, II

By Major Jackson

“We always kicked for the same team. We prayed
next to each other on the sajjada during salat.
ESSAYS / Winter 2012

The Dadaab Suite

By Major Jackson ,  Photography by Marcus Bleasdale

Just as the World Food Program charter plane en route to Nairobi sped along the dirt airstrip to its lifting speed and began its ascent, I looked down at the sprawl of white tents and clusters of globular huts below where I had just spent a...

Photo by Marcus Bleasdale