Fifth Illinois poet laureate: Angela Jackson
Chicagoan follows in footsteps of Sandburg, Brooks, and Prine
Angela Jackson is the state’s fifth poet laureate. (Facebook/Gov. J.B. Pritzker)
By Ted Cox
Illinois has its fifth poet laureate: Angela Jackson.
The Governor’s Office made the announcement Wednesday after first lady M.K. Pritzker led the selection process first announced in June.
“Illinois has a proud history of poets who have given us reason for hope in dark times, offered poignant insight into our own humanity, and delivered profound social critiques, and as I considered the nominees to be our next poet laureate, all of these qualities were important in making the final choice,” Pritzker said in a statement as the honorary chairwoman and final judge of the 2020 Illinois Poet Laureate Search Committee. “Members of the committee nominated astounding talents from our state, and I’m grateful for their work. After spending countless hours reviewing all the nominees’ works, I’m confident that Angela Jackson will continue to be a bright shining light of wisdom, inspiration and connection as she promotes the power of poetry.”
Jackson follows in the footsteps of the first Illinois poet laureate, Howard Austin, named in 1936. He was followed by Carl Sandburg (1962-67), Gwendolyn Brooks (1968-2000), and Kevin Stein (2003-2017). In June, in announcing the selection process for a next poet laureate, Gov. Pritzker posthumously granted John Prine the honor after the longtime Chicago singer and songwriter died earlier this year from COVID-19.
Jackson has published three chapbooks and four volumes of poetry, and the Governor’s Office cited that her collections include “Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners,” awarded the Carl Sandburg Award and the Chicago Sun-Times/Friends of Literature Book of the Year Award, while “And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New” was nominated for the National Book Award. “It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time” was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the Pen/Open Book Award, and was finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and for the Milt Kessler Poetry Prize.
The poet, a Mississippi native who moved to Chicago as a child with her family as part of the Great Migration, has won the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, a Pushcart Prize, the Illinois Center for the Book Heritage Award, the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame Fuller Award, and the Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent from Chicago State University, as well as TriQuartly’s Daniel Curley Award, named after the longtime University of Illinois writing instructor and author.
“I am honored and excited to have been selected to serve as Illinois poet laureate,” Jackson said in a statement. “Legendary Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks said, ‘Poetry is life distilled.’ I hope to bring to Illinoisans poetry that they can relate to, be lifted by, and find their lives illuminated in. Poems bring us to ourselves and poems bring us together.”
Brooks had a particularly powerful influence on her work. Jackson told the Chicago Sun-Times: “I kew her, I studied her work and modeled my words after her words — the way she handled language so intensely.”
Jackson has degrees from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.
Her predecessor Kevin Stein lauded her work, saying her poems “dwell in fervid topographies of family and myth, heart and tongue. Her lines bristle with the melody of conversation and soulful blues, her voice unwaveringly human.”
“Illinois has a proud history of influential poets and I’m proud to continue this tradition by formally appointing our state’s next Poet Laureate,” Gov. Pritzker added. “Angela Jackson is an acclaimed poet and writer and her expansive breadth of work has already inspired so many. I know her words will have a profound impact on the residents of our state as well as the next generation of aspiring poets.”
Pritzker posted on Facebook a poem Jackson published this week in The New York Times in response to the newspaper’s seeking “Poems of Gratitude From Illinois” to celebrate Thanksgiving. Jackson wrote, “We give thanks — for red cardinals that appear anywhere … for the kiss of the Great Lake Michigan, on a Big Chicago, bodacious and bursting with promises/Thanks for the lakes and rivers that flow through a state of dreams and blood and tears, thin rivers of toil that lace the land and a Big River, Mississippi, that runs,” as well as “mid-cities churning industry” and “rural places poised on tractors.”