Major Jackson  (b. 1968) LINKS Major Jackson http://www.pewarts.org/95/Jackson/ The austere setting of the PEW Fellowship for the Arts Web site is a great place to read about the impressive achievements of poet Major Jackson. The PEW’s page on Jackson highlights some of these achievements in addition to providing a biography and samples of Jackson’s works. Interviews: Gill Ott and Major Jackson http://www.webdelsol.com/pbq/issues/63/ott_jackson.html “A key component of my vision as a curator was to provide an artistic forum for under-represented voices,” says Jackson in his interview with Painted Bridge Quarterly, a literary magazine at which Jackson served both as an intern and as finance director. BIOGRAPHY Jackson was born and raised in Philadelphia. He earned a B.S. at Temple University and an M.F.A. at the University of Oregon. His book Leaving Saturn won the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. He has received awards and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, MacDowell Artist Colony, Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and Provincetown Fine Arts Center. His poem “Duck Girl on the Occasion of Spring” was commissioned and performed by Philadelphia’s Concerto Soloists. His poetry has been published in numerous journals, among them American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, and the New Yorker. His work has been anthologized in several collections, among them Beacon’s Best of 1999: Creative Writing by Men and Women of All Colors, Spirit and Flame: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, and Xconnect: Writers of the Information Age. He is a member of the Dark Room Collective and, from 1992 to 1999, served as literary arts curator of the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia. Currently, he is an assistant professor in the English department at Xavier University of Louisiana and lives in New Orleans with his son and his partner, Kristen Johanson.