Imani Elizabeth Jackson
Photo by photograph by S*an D. Henry-Smith
Bio
Imani Elizabeth Jackson is a poet from Chicago, Illinois. Her writings appear in Apogee, BOMB, TriQuarterly, Poetry, Triple Canopy, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of Futurepoem’s 2020 Other Futures Award, the Arkansas International’s inaugural C.D. Wright Award, selected by Hanif Abdurraqib, and she has also received several awards from Brown University. She holds degrees from Brown and Reed College. Under the name mouthfeel, she co-authored the poetry-cookbook Consider the Tongue (Antenna Paper Machine, 2019) with S*an D. Henry-Smith; she also contributed to Francesca Capone’s Weaving Language: Lexicon (Essay Press, 2022). She is the author of the chapbook saltsitting (reissued by g l o s s, 2020) and her first book, Flag, is forthcoming from Futurepoem.
Two years ago, I stumbled upon an essay by my aunt, the great poet Angela Jackson. It had been adapted from a talk that she’d given in 2007 and was primarily about the Black Arts Movement in Chicago, in which she’d been very involved. At the end, she mentioned a conversation she’d had with her mother—my grandmother Angeline—about what path in life I might end up taking. I was in my early teens then and completely oblivious to the fact that they were divining plans for me in the dining room on Wentworth Avenue, but in that conversation my grandmother had said to my aunt that I could be a writer. “I almost fell off my chair,” my aunt remembered of the moment. As did I, when I first read those words.
When I got the morning call about this award, I almost fell out of bed! I cannot describe here how extraordinarily lucky I felt and still feel, and how right-on-time the news came. Receiving this fellowship has alleviated some burdens and will give me some of what I need most in this moment: time—which makes room for so many life-sustaining practices, imagination and poetry among them. I look forward to the time to come, which I will spend getting closer to water and earth, continuing to imagine the many ways we as Black people hold presence with/in the landscape.
Of my grandmother, my aunt wrote: “But my mother knows there is possibility (a Hoyt Fuller word)—possibility and strength in the pen.” I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts and the panelists who selected us fellows for gifting each of us the resources to continue to practice that which my grandmother knew.