Richard Jackson

Richard Jackson was born in 1946 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and attended Columbia University’s engineering program. He earned his BA in English at Merrimack College, an MA at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English, and a PhD in English at Yale University.

Jackson’s many collections of poetry include Footprints (2025); The Heart as Framed: New and Selected Poems (2022); and Broken Horizons (2018), all published by Press 53, as well as Dispatches: Prose Poems (Wet Cement Press, 2022). His poems have been translated into eighteen languages. 

Jackson has also edited thirty-two chapbooks by Eastern European poets and has served as the editor of numerous anthologies, including A Bridge of Voices: Contemporary Slovene Poetry and Perspectives (Bridges Press, 2020), coedited with Barbara Siegel Carlson and Cody Taylor; Ko vdre senca / When the Shadow Breaks / Lorsque l’ombre force by Tomaž Salamun (Slovene Writers’ Union, 2010); and The Fire Under the Moon: Contemporary Slovene Poetry (PM Books, 1999), coedited with ‎Mia Dintinjana and ‎Rachel Morgan. 

Jackson is also the author of the prose works The Dismantling of Time in Contemporary Poetry (University of Alabama, 1988), winner of the Elizabeth Agee Prize, and Acts of Mind: Conversations with Contemporary Poets (University of Alabama, 1984).

Of his poems, Gerald Stern wrote:

I think he is either the god Hermes or a sparrow. He is certainly a messenger. And what he says is contained in a single word, although it comes out as amazement, anger, joy, sadness, in an astounding cascade of images and a variety of tongues. He is a poet of great sweep and vision. He is deeply tender. He is a master of music, one of our finest poets.
 

Jackson’s honors include five Pushcart Prizes, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, the Juniper Prize for Poetry, the Order of Freedom of the Republic of Slovenia for literary and humanitarian work in the Balkans, and the AWP George Garrett Award. He has also been awarded grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

The founder of the Meacham Writers’ Workshop at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Jackson is a distinguished professor emeritus at the institution, where he also taught English and creative writing for forty-six years. He currently teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Chattanooga.