Major Jackson, poet and Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor of English, has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, one of the most prestigious honors granted to “midcareer” academics and artists who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts. The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation receives between 3,500 and 4,000 applications each year and awards approximately 200 fellowships.
Established in 1925 by former United States Senator and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim, in memory of their seventeen-year-old son who died in 1922, the foundation has sought to "add to the educational, literary, artistic, and scientific power of this country, and also to provide for the cause of better international understanding."
"I am genuinely honored and look forward to the time to complete a few projects," Jackson said after hearing the news. "It is good to follow in the long tradition of poets I've admired who have also been awarded a Guggenheim. It is fortifying and affirming."
Jackson is the author of three collections of poetry: Holding Company, Hoops and Leaving Saturn, which was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. He has published poems and essays in periodicals including AGNI, American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Poetry and Tin House. His work has been included in Best American Poetry (2004, 2011) and Best of the Best American Poetry.
Poetry editor of the Harvard Review, Jackson has also been a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award and been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has served as a creative arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
