Northwestern Events Calendar

May
2
2018

Leon Forrest Lecture: Angela Jackson

When: Wednesday, May 2, 2018
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM CT

Where: Harris Hall, Room 107, 1881 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Contact: Elizabeth Foster   (847) 467-2981

Group: Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Co-Sponsor: African American Studies Department

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

A Road of Luminous Words: Poetry and Fiction by Angela Jackson


According to Jackson, her life as a poet and writer has been a climb up a rough side of a mountain, but she has worked her way up by making a road of luminous words. For her lecture she will discuss her apprenticeship as a poet and writer at OBAC (the Organization of Black American Culture) Writers Workshop and in creative writing classes at Northwestern. She will also read from her two works, Where I Must Go and Roads, Where There Are No Roads. In addition, she will share poems from It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time and other volumes. 

Born in Greenville, Mississippi, poet Angela Jackson is the fifth of nine children. She spent her early life in Greenville before moving with her family to Chicago’s Southside. Jackson earned a BA at Northwestern University, where she received the Academy of American Poets Prize, and an MA in Latin American and Caribbean studies at the University of Chicago. In Chicago, she became a prominent member of the Organization of Black American Culture.

Angela Jackson is an award-winning poet, playwright, and novelist. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including the National Book Award–nominated And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New. Her novel Where I Must Go won the American Book Award in 2009. Its sequel, Roads, Where There Are No Roads, was published in 2017. In 2017, Jackson completed the biography of Gwendolyn Brooks, A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun: The Life & Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks. Additionally, Jackson was a longlist finalist for the PEN Open Book Award for her 2015 poetry collection, It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time. Other honors include a Pushcart Prize, Academy of American Poets Prize, TriQuarterly’s Daniel Curley Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award. Jackson lives in Chicago.

The Leon Forrest Lecture Series

Northwestern’s Forrest Lecture celebrates the life and work of the late novelist and beloved professor Leon Forrest, professor of English and, from 1985 to 1994, chair of African American studies. Past Forrest Lecturers include Danny Glover, Jamaica Kincaid and Henry Louis Gates Jr. as well as Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, who edited Forrest’s first novel.

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