Award-winning poet Didi Jackson, a Poetry Society of America honoree, and acclaimed poet Major Jackson, recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Writers’ Award, read from their work as part of the 2025-26 Althea Ward Clark W’21 Reading Series. The writers’ books will be available to purchase and have signed.
This event is cosponsored by the Lewis Center for the Arts and Labyrinth Books.
About the Authors
Photo credit: Major Jackson
Didi Jackson is the author of the poetry collections My Infinity (2024) and Moon Jar (2020). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bomb, The New Yorker, and World Literature Today, among other journals and magazines. She has had poems selected for Best American Poetry, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day, and The Slowdown with Tracy K. Smith. She is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and is a Dean’s Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she teaches creative writing. Most recently she completed her certification as a Tennessee Naturalist.
Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan
Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, including Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (2023), The Absurd Man (2020), Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006) and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. He is also the author of A Beat Beyond: The Selected Prose of Major Jackson edited by Amor Kohli. A recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, John S. Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry London, and World Literature Today. Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.
Admission & Details
The reading is free and open to the public; no tickets required.
Directions
Get directions to Labyrinth Bookstore, located at 122 Nassau Street in Princeton.
Accessibility
Labyrinth Books is an accessible venue. Visit our Venues and Studios section for accessibility information at our various locations. Guests in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at 609-258-5262 or email LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week in advance of the event date.