The Althea Ward Clark W’21 Reading Series, presented by the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University, continues the 2025-26 season with a reading by award-winning poet and Poetry Society of America honoree Didi Jackson and acclaimed poet Major Jackson, recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Writers’ Award. The reading begins at 6:00 p.m. on February 17 at Labyrinth Books, located at 122 Nassau Street in Princeton. The event is free and open to the public, with the authors’ books available to purchase and have signed. The bookstore is an accessible venue. Guests in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week prior to the event date.
Didi Jackson. 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. Jackson is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and 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.
Major Jackson. 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.
The Lewis Center’s Program in Creative Writing annually presents the Althea Ward Clark W’21 Reading Series, which provides an opportunity for students, as well as all in the greater Princeton region, to hear and meet the best contemporary writers. All readings, unless otherwise noted, take place at 6:00 p.m. at Labyrinth Books and are free and open to the public.
Additional readings in the 2025-26 series include:
- March 24 — Reading by Kaitlyn Greenidge and Hisham Matar
- April 14 — Spring student reading featuring new work by creative writing students (5 p.m. at Chancellor Green)
- April 20 & 21 — Creative writing seniors read from their independent work in fiction, poetry, screenwriting, creative nonfiction, and playwriting
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the Program in Creative Writing, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events presented by the Lewis Center each year, most of them free.
