The Longfellow Summer Arts Festival brings music, poetry, and community to the East Lawn of the Longfellow House on Sunday afternoons through the summer. All events are free and open to the public. This reading is presented in partnership with the New England Poetry Club.
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, 2020); “Roll Deep” (W. W. Norton, 2015); 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) and 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, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Jackson was awarded a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Award and also received honors from the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress.
Jackson is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He also hosts “The Slowdown” podcast, a partnership between the Poetry Foundation and American Public Media, and is poetry editor of the Harvard Review.