Angela Jackson

This article is about Angela Jackson. For other uses, see Angela Jackson (disambiguation).

Angela Jackson
Born	(1951-07-25) July 25, 1951 Greenville, Mississippi, U.S.
Education	Northwestern University (BA) University of Chicago (MA)
Occupations	Poet playwright novelist

Angela Jackson (born July 25, 1951) is an American poet, playwright, and novelist based in Chicago, Illinois. Jackson has been a member of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), a community that fosters the intellectual development of Black creators, since 1970. She has held teaching positions at Kennedy-King College, Columbia College Chicago, Framingham State University, and Howard University.Jackson became the fifth Illinois Poet Laureate in 2020.

Biography

Childhood/Early Life

Angela Jackson was born in Greenville, Mississippi, the fifth of nine children. She grew up in the Englewood neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, where her father, George Jackson Sr., and mother, Angeline Robinson Jackson, moved during the Great Migration. She was raised as a Catholic. As a child, Jackson regularly read books from Chicago’s Hiram Kelly Branch library. Jackson claims that she aspired to be a poet since before she was ten years old.

Education

Jackson attended Catholic elementary school. She graduated third in her high school class at Loretto Academy.

In 1977, she graduated from Northwestern University, where she won an Academy of American Poets Award, and the University of Chicago with an M.A. in Latin American and Caribbean studies. Her novels Where I Must Go and Roads, Where There Are No Roads were inspired by her experiences at Northwestern.

Career

She was a member of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) with young black writers such as Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), Carolyn Rodgers, Sterling Plumpp, and was editor of the journal Nommo.

Personal life

Jackson is Catholic.

Awards

• 1973: Conrad Kent Rivers Memorial Award
• 1974: Academy of American Poets Award from Northwestern University
• 1979: Illinois Art Council Creative Writing Fellowship in Fiction
• 1980: National Endowment For the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Fiction
• 1984: Hoyt W. Fuller Award for Literary Excellence
• 1985: American Book Award
• 1984: DuSable Museum Writers Seminar Poetry Prize
• 1984: Pushcart Prize for Poetry
• 1989: ETA Gala Award
• 1996: Illinois Authors Literary Heritage Award
• Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards
• five for fiction and one for poetry; The Carl Sandburg Award
• Chicago Sun-Times Friends of Literature Book of the Year Award
• 2000: Illinois Art Council Creative Writing Fellowship in Playwriting
• 2002: Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America
• 2008: American Book Award
• 2022: Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winner

Works

Poetry

• "VooDoo/Love Magic", Poetry Foundation
• Voodoo Love Magic. Third World Press. 1974.
• The Greenville Club, 1977 (chapbook)
• Solo in the Boxcar Third Floor E. Oba House. 1985. ISBN 978-0-933653-01-6.
• The Man with the White Liver. Illustrator Melora Walters. Contact II Publications. 1987. ISBN 978-0-936556-16-1.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
• Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners. Northwestern University Press. 1993. ISBN 978-0-8101-5001-0.
• And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems New and Selected. Northwestern University Press. 1997. ISBN 978-0-8101-5076-8.

Plays

• Witness!, 1970
• Shango Diaspora: An African American Myth of Womanhood and Love, 1980
• Comfort Stew. Northwestern University Press. 1984. ISBN 978-0-8101-4117-9. Archived from the original on September 30, 2020. Retrieved December 12, 2020. Also known as When the Wind Blows
• Lightfoot: The Crystal Stair

Novels

• Treemont Stone
• Where I Must Go. Northwestern University Press. 2009. ISBN 978-0-8101-5185-7. Archived from the original on November 25, 2020. Retrieved December 12, 2020. American Book Award
• Roads, Where There Are No Roads. Northwestern University Press. 2017. ISBN 978-0-8101-3472-0. Archived from the original on January 21, 2021. Retrieved December 12, 2020.

Memoir

• Apprenticeship in the House of Cowrie Shells

Anthologies

• Pamela Gemin; Paula Sergi, eds. (1999). Boomer Girls: poems by women from the baby boom generation. University of Iowa Press. ISBN 978-0-87745-687-2.
• Kalamu ya Salaam, ed. (1998). 360,̊ a revolution of Black poets. Black Words. ISBN 978-0-7394-1585-6.

External links

• Angela Jackson Bio from Illinois Poet Laureate
• Nora Brooks Blakely (August 1985). "Word Wizard". Ebony Jr. Magazine.