Best American Poetry. Jackson serves as poetry editor of the
Harvard Review.
A Philadelphia native, Jackson pursued accounting at Temple University. After college he took a job as finance director at Philadelphia’s Painted Bride Art Center, where he developed a taste for art and activism. He turned to a brief career as a literary critic and journalist of the hip-hop scene before heading off to the University of Oregon to earn his Master of Fine Arts in poetry. He spent 18 years as a professor of English at The University of Vermont.
Jackson recently told an interviewer at Vanderbilt that art “can be an immense tool for community-gathering. We are less alone when we hear the human condition articulated in a poem or essay.”