Angela Jackson

Angela Jackson (born July 25, 1951) is an award-winning poet, playwright and writer based in Chicago.^[1]

Life

Angela Jackson was born in Greenville, Mississippi, the fifth of nine children,^[2] but grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where her father, George Jackson, Sr., and mother, Angeline Robinson Jackson, moved. In 1977, she graduated from Northwestern University,and Loretto academy where she won the Academy of American Poets Prize, and the University of Chicago with an M.A. in Latin American and Caribbean studies.^[2]

She joined the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) with young black writers such as Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), Carolyn Rodgers, Sterling Plumpp,^[3] and was editor of the journal Nommo.^[4]

Jackson lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.^[5]

Awards

• 1973 Conrad Kent Rivers Memorial Award in 1973
• 1974 Academy of American Poets Award from Northwestern University in 1974
• 1979 Illinois Art Council Creative Writing Fellowship in Fiction in 1979
• 1980 National Endowment For the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Fiction
• 1984 Hoyt W. Fuller Award for Literary Excellence
• 1985 American Book Award^[6]
• 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^[7]
• 2008 American Book Award ^[6]

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.
• Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners. Northwestern University Press. 1993. ISBN 978-0-8101-5001-0.
• 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
• When the Wind Blows, 1984 (better known as the eta production entitled Comfort Stew)
• Lightfoot: The Crystal Stair,

Novels

• Treemont Stone
• Where I Must Go (2009), American Book Award.

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.

References

1. "Angela Jackson". Mississippi Writers and Musicians. February 4, 2008. Retrieved June 30, 2009.
2. Angela Jackson biography at Poetry Foundation.
3. Richard Friedman; Peter Kostakis; Darlene Pearlstein, eds. (1976). 15 Chicago Poets. Yellow Press. ISBN 978-0-916328-04-7.
4. "The Eighth Kent Conrad Rivers Award", Black World, July 1973, p. 49.
5. William L. Andrews; Frances Smith Foster; Trudier Harris, eds. (2001). The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-513883-2.
6. American Booksellers Association (2013). "The American Book Awards / Before Columbus Foundation [1980–2012]". BookWeb. Archived from the original on March 13, 2013. Retrieved September 25, 2013. 1985 ... Solo in the Box Car, Third Floor E ... 2008 ... Where I Must Go: A Novel (TriQuarterly)
7. "Poetry Society of America Awards for 2002". Poetry Society of America. July 27, 2004.

External links

• Nora Brooks Blakely (Aug 1985). "Word Wizard". Ebony Jr. Magazine.