Major Jackson

Harman Writer-In-Residence, Spring 2010

photo by Erin Patrice O’Brien

Major Jackson is the author of two books of poetry: Hoops (2006, Norton) and Leaving Saturn (2002, University of Georgia Press).  He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, the New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, and other literary magazines.  Hoops was selected as a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. Leaving Saturn, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems.  Jackson’s third volume of poetry, Holding Company, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.

He is a recipient of 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 served as a creative arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and is currently the poetry editor of the Harvard Review. Jackson lives in Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont.

When the sidewalk’s eyes
were weeping
When snowflakes burst
from the pillows
As the mayor talked from the
bottlecaps of his ears
As the old women dusted off
their beauty marks
When the graffiti artist’s hand
became a saffron scarf
When the breeze flashed its
grilled teeth
As the sun torched the forest
to a moon
When sad Amelia stabbed
the clouds in her veins
When my lips gathered at the
beaches of your lips
As I listened to the speeding traffic
of your hallowed spine

— from Sleepwalkers in Heaven