“Streetwise, energetic, and wry, Jackson’s writing crackles. This is prose that makes music on the page.” - Elliott Holt, Deputy Editor, Kenyon Review
Jared Jackson is a writer, editor, educator, and arts administrator born in Hartford, CT. His writing has been published in the Best American Short Stories 2023, New York Times Book Review, Yale Review, Guernica, Kenyon Review, n+1, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. He has been awarded residencies and fellowships from MacDowell (’21, ’23), Yaddo (’22, ’24), Center for Fiction, Baldwin for the Arts, Tin House, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Writer’s Block Residency. He was a finalist for the 2023 Granum Foundation Prize. He received an MFA in fiction from Columbia University.
Jackson is also the director of literary programs at PEN America, where he oversees writing programs including the Emerging Voices Fellowship, the Dreaming Out Loud workshop series, and the Worker Writers School. Additionally, he administers the New York office’s PEN Out Loud series, PEN America’s flagship literary conversation series showcasing literary excellence and a wide range of diverse voices including Ai Weiwei, Wole Soyinka, Kazuo Ishiguro, Nikki Giovanni, Isabel Allende, and Zadie Smith, among others. In 2022, he was named a New York Foundation for the Arts Executive Leader of Color. He has taught at Columbia University and elsewhere.
Photo credit: Roque Nonini