Celebrate National Poetry Month with Angela Jackson, our fifth Illinois Poet Laureate, who says that poetry belongs to each of us and can lift and illuminate lives, uniting people.

Angela Jackson is an award-winning poet, novelist, and playwright who has published three chapbooks and four volumes of poetry.  Born in Greenville, Mississippi, and raised on Chicago’s Southside, she was educated at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

Her collections of poetry include VooDoo/Love Magic (1974); Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners (1993) which was awarded the Carl Sandburg Award and the Chicago Sun-Times/Friends of Literature Book of the Year Award; And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New (1998), nominated for the National Book Award; and It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time (2015), nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the Pen/Open Book Award, a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a finalist for the Milt Kessler Poetry Prize. She received a Pushcart Prize and an American Book Award for Solo in the Boxcar Third Floor E (1985). Jackson’s next book, More Than Meat and Raiment, is scheduled to be published in 2022.

Learn more about Angela Jackson and the office of the Illinois Poet Laureate at https://bit.ly/IL-Poet-Laureate.

This event is produced by Chillicothe Public Library in partnership with the Illinois Humanities Road Scholars Speakers Bureau.