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Poet Major Jackson

Poet Major Jackson

 

 

Introduction to Major Jackson.   1:24 min.  Interview:  Raymond Elman.  Videography: Lee Skye.  Music: Carmen Cicero.  Recorded:  11/18/2023, Miami Book Fair.

 

MAJOR JACKSON (b.1968) is the author of six books of poetry, including “Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems” (2023), “The Absurd Man” (2020), “Roll Deep” (2015), “Holding Company” (2010), “Hoops” (2006) and “Leaving Saturn” (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. His edited volumes include: “Best American Poetry 2019”, “Renga for Obama”, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems”. He is also the author of A Beat Beyond: The Selected Prose of Major Jackson” edited by Amor Kohli. A recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, John S. Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major 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 Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry London, and World Literature Today. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.

— https://www.majorjackson.com/

 

The videos below are organized by Success Factor, and run between 2 and 4 minutes. Click on any video. You must be connected to the Internet to view the videos.

 

 

EXPOSURE TO BROAD INFLUENCES:  2:34 min.

Where did you grow up and what was your first awareness of art of any discipline?

 

INSIGHT & INSPIRATION:   3:41 min.

How did you become a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC) in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on the northern tip of Cape Cod?

 

INSIGHT & INSPIRATION:   4:11 min.

The tiny town of Provincetown attracted an extraordinary galaxy of U.S. Poet Laureates and Pulitzer Prize recipients like Stanley Kunitz, Robert Pinsky, Alan Dugan, Mark Strand, Mark Doty, and Marie Howe. How did they influence you?