Manzanita hosts a Major literary figure

The word aptonym describes a similarity between a person's name and occupation, which well suits Major Jackson, a very big name in poetry, who will be at Manzanita’s Hoffman Center for the Arts for a poetry reading and book signing this Friday, March 1.

An elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and poetry editor of Harvard Review, Jackson is the author of six books of poetry: “Razzle Dazzle,” “The Absurd Man,” “Roll Deep,” “Holding Company,” “Hoops” and “Leaving Saturn,” 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.”

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. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.

Friday’s reading will take place at 7:30 pm at the Hoffman Center for the Arts, located at 594 Laneda Avenue in Manzanita. For more information go to hoffmanarts.org or call 503-368-3846.