Major Jackson has an appetite for words.
Whether he's teaching, writing or critiquing, at the center of Jackson's work is a voracious hunger for artful language-underpinned by a commitment to painting the quotidian in new and unexpected ways.
Language Takes Root
His love for language was cultivated during his childhood in North Philadelphia.
"Language was such a part of our culture. It felt like the skin of our community. This is the city that gave the world 'jawn,'" Jackson said-referencing the famously flexible Philadelphia word that can stand in for a person, place or thing. "My friends and I grew into the language of our era just as we also helped to shape language. We were ever aware of the latest phrases and nuances of hip speech that, as with any age group or community, announced that we belonged."
Jackson's youth coincided with the emergence of a new genre of music-hip-hop. While his peers grabbed the mic to test their skills out loud, Jackson turned inward.
"I was not yet extroverted enough to externalize my love of language, so I turned to the page, and took pleasure in reading and writing poetry," he said. "The cleverness of rhyme and verbal flow deeply influenced how I listened and attuned me to cadences of human speech, metaphor and layers of meaning. It also made me hunger for words."
Life as Craft
The Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities is the author of six books of poetry, and has published poems and essays across a broad range of publications including the American Poetry Review, The New Yorker and Orion Magazine. An elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Jackson has received the Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Award and a Pew Fellowship, among many other honors.
Most recently, he was named a juror for the 2026 Griffin Poetry Prize, the world's largest international prize for a single book of poetry.
For Jackson, poetry makes feelings permanent, song-like and transcendent. It should reveal the strangeness and sacredness of inner life, a belief that undergirds his approach to teaching. In his classes, Jackson challenges students to treat what makes us human as material-approaching lived experience as something to examine, record and shape with intention.
"Lyric poetry has as its material the dazzling complexity and beauty of raw emotions and thought, which can be awkward and embarrassing," Jackson said. "My classes are about normalizing the conversations we have with ourselves while learning to give them shape."
That same pedagogy guides how Jackson writes and reads poetry.
"As artists we can and should be more ambitious, more exploratory, unsatisfied with past innovations," he said. "I am on the lookout for the new, the newly uttered, the freshly verbal portrait-the thing said that makes my mouth water, that exposes my thirst."
Jackson is also attentive to lineage, listening for the conversations poets share with earlier generations. "You can hear Robert Hayden in the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa, or Pablo Neruda in the poetry of Li-Young Lee," he said.
In Service of Art
He views his appointment to the Griffin Poetry Prize jury as both an honor and an extension of his service to the art form.
"The Griffin Prize is one of the most distinguished, global awards for poetry," Jackson said. "It is a deep honor to serve on the committee, and I'm grateful the trustees trust my perspective on what constitutes innovative and engaging poetry for our time."
When it comes to his own writing, Jackson remains restless. "I genuinely worry about atrophying into comfort," he said. "Writing is life. Any award or prize is an invitation to hit the reset button and begin anew."
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