Author Major Jackson to Give Reading on Campus

As part of the Visiting Writers Lecture Series, Major Jackson will give a reading on Sept. 15 at 7:30 p.m. in Levis Browsing Room (Dinand Library). The event is free and open to the public. Jackson’s debut volume of poems, Leaving Saturn (2001), was selected by poet and novelist Al Young to receive the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African-American poet, was nominated for a 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award and has received critical attention in the Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Parnassus, and on National Public Radio. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Callaloo, Grand Street and the New Yorker. Formerly the Literary Arts Curator of Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia, he is the recipient of awards from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Pew Fellowship in the Arts, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as a commission from the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia. In 2003, he received the prestigious Whiting Writers’ Award. He is an associate professor of English at the University of Vermont and a member of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina. His second book of poems, Hoops, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.