July 2025 Feature: Angela Jackson

Angela Jackson is an award-winning poet, novelist, and playwright who has published three chapbooks, four volumes of poetry, and served as the fifth Poet Laureate of Illinois.

Born in Greenville, Mississippi, and raised on Chicago's South Side, Angela Jackson was educated at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. Her most recent accomplishments include: her appointment as the fifth Poet Laureate of Illinois, the 2022 Black Excellence Lifetime Achievement Award from the Black Ensemble Theater, and a Poetry Foundation 2022 Ruth Lilly Lifetime Achievement award for poetry. Jackson’s most recent publication is a collection of poems, More Than Meat and Raiment, which came out in 2023. Her other collections of poetry include Voo Doo/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) that was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the Pen/Open Book Award, 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 has also written several plays, including Witness! (1978), Shango Diaspora: An African American Myth of Womanhood and Love (1980), and Comfort Stew (2019). Her first novel, Where I Must Go (2009), won the American Book Award. Its highly anticipated sequel, Roads, Where There Are No Roads (2017), won the 2018 John Gardner Fiction prize. She is also the author of the significant biography A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun: The Life and Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks. She has received the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, TriQuarterly’s Daniel Curley Award, Illinois Center for the Book Heritage Award, Chicago Literary Hall of Fame Fuller Award, Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent from Chicago State University, the Academy of American Poets Prize, and grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council. She was a twenty-year member of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) Writers Workshop, succeeding the late Hoyt W. Fuller as its Chair. Her poetry and fiction have been published in many journals and anthologies.

For Our People

      Homage to Margaret Walker, "For My People" (1942)

for our people everywhere singing

their gospels and their rap, their blues,

R&B, and their jazz, their soul and their neo soul, all great Black music,

scuffling, scrimping, struggling to get by,

for our people working as wage slaves,

in collars blue, white, and pink, doing the best

they can with what they have, hoping

it will not be taken away with a pink slip,

a sudden slip from a parapet, on cement

into disability or welfare, or not,

hustling to keep from being crushed

on the unemployment line

for our people

for the way of years sipping summer from a tall glass of ice water,

buttermilk and cornbread out of a mayonnaise jar,

years testing watermelon, cutting s plug of sweetness,

knocking on the round or oblong to listen to the taste,

for the excellence of young boys running like they stole something

but only owing themselves and the strength in their legs

and girls who could keep up before breast held them back

for our people and red Kool-Aid days,

for smothered chicken and our cries smothered

in a world that did not adore us, but ignored us

or worse and ran us back on the other side of the viaduct

where we belonged, not in the wild world we could conquer

or excel in, given the gates opening and tools for redress

for our people everywhere

growing gardens on vacant lots, training roses

and black-eyed susans and perennials in front yards, raking

leaves and shoveling snow, scooping doo and picking up

litter, washing and ironing out the wrinkles of everyday existence

for our people

running with nowhere to go, watching

television and movies looking for ourselves, searching

books and the nooks and crannies of history

for a glimpse of what was waylaid, and what is to be,

in barbershops and beauty parlors and ice cream parlors

and the stone faces in funeral parlors, picking up children 

from school from daycare, taking them to football, soccer,

baseball, tennis, basketball, volleyball, having a ball

at family reunions on Saturday nights

for our people who came in chains

tortured over turbulent waves, broken

hearted, and broken tongued, and broken magic,

broken bloodlines, strangled and whipped, distraught

and driven to the edge of the mind and beyond

for our people leaping to the sea, feeding sharks and myths and cautionary

tales, surviving the journey to reach auction blocks

a prurient pedestal for deposed queens, and chieftains, villagers

humiliated, abused, raped, and riddled with misery into

exquisite survivals, changing vocabulary and clothes, changing

into sleek panthers and superheroes, making the world safe

for demonstrations of protest and affection, all beauty and love,

scapegoated, pilloried, denied the excellence we bring

for our people grasping for gadgets and genuflecting

to electric celebrity, worshipping trinkets and noisome

symbols that blink and itch the eyes, gaming and gambling

and laughing to keep from crying, and crying laughing,

cracking up and falling out, drinking suicide, spilling milk

and blood, gunned down under lampposts, in playgrounds,

bloodied in drive-bys, in alleys, in living rooms, in bed sleeping

for our people bludgeoned by police and each other,

killed by presumptuous watchers, taxed for Black and driving while Black,

shot in the back, falsely convicted, sentenced to dwell alone, and

want to be redeemed, incarcerated in stone, tracked in department stores,

harassed, stalked in malls, and all the places people spend and sell,

our people selling loose squares, oils, socks and peanuts 

on the corners of our desperate longing, for hair, for nails, for body graffiti

for our people in the casinos, scheming in pennies from heaven

with one-armed pirates, dreaming in die and cards and  dealers,

dreaming numbers and playing them till they hit,

for our people drowning in spirits, burning throats and pockets

losing it all, spoiling livers, lungs, and kidneys, hearts with too much,

each of us addicted to drugs of fashion, to ancient hurt,

choosing crabs in a barrel or lifting as we climb, each one teach one

for our people who do not belong to me but to all of us for we belong

to each other, must hold each other in heart and mind

for our people in the citadels of learning and the one-room schoolhouse,

in the storefronts of funeral-parlor fans and the cathedrals of painted windows

and arched ceilings that lend toward sky

for our people in the baptismal pool, in white robes on the edge of the river,

for our people, chanting and praying and hoping for a sweeter brew to sip and savor

let a new earth arise

let justice pour like trembling rain and mercy prevail as plentiful fields

let our strength be matched by vulnerable honesty of heart

may resilience be our guide, for we will stumble and then will rise

more able having fallen, more beautiful having met each other

along the way as we lifted each other up, hero-people who go out of their way

for love, and stay on the way of goodness

let our people be the people who remember and believe that love is all our

portions

all our currencies and all are one, each of us injured or exalted, betrayer or 

betrayed, muted

and declamatory, all one, each of us all of us, each private star beloved in

the universe,

each of us creature of burdens and singing angel merged as one, alive and

moving upward

holding on and lifting this earth, our house, precious and precarious, and

God be our witness

between this gravity and this grace, hold tight and fly

Copyright © 2022 by Northwestern University. Published 2022 by TriQuarterly Books / Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.

THE INTERVIEW

This interview was conducted between Angela Jackson and Jae Nichelle on June 24, 2025.

Thank you so much for sharing “For Our People” with us. What led you to expand the conversation that Margaret Walker started? How did you decide where to end?

Margaret Walker was my Afro-American Literature professor at Northwestern. I was enraptured when she read “For My People” in class. It moved me, so I knew I knew I would write something in response to it. Over forty years later, I wrote “For Our People.” My mother had recently died and I searched around inside myself for something to fill that big hole that her vacancy had left. I had to speak to something large. The largest thing I knew and loved was our people. I believed the Sixties had answered Walker’s “martial songs”. I had come to recognize from Cornell West that love is an active force and I wanted to add that to the conversation. And I wanted to open up the conversation to our planetary responsibility. And I had to end on hope, where I must live and end. Faith and love and hope.

Your poetry has spanned decades, from Voo Doo/Love Magic in 1974 to More Than

Meat and Raiment in 2022. How has your relationship with language, form, and purpose

evolved over this time?

I have always paid attention to the shape of my poems. How form and content intertwine. I find a poem to be an organic thing. It's an expression of its expression. It was in my most recent book, More Than Meat and Raiment, that I experimented with formal poetry. I wrote sonnets, villanelles (It took me ten years.), haiku, and sestina. I don’t know if I will continue in this vein. It depends on how I feel and how the poem speaks to me. Right now, I am interested in the Blues. We’ll see how the Blues plays out in the next book.

How did you approach your role as the fifth Poet Laureate of Illinois, and what was your favorite achievement during your tenure?

I saw myself as a servant of poetry for The People, and an inspiration. I modeled myself after Gwendolyn Brooks, the third Poet Laureate and first Black woman to serve as Poet Laureate of the great state of Illinois. I would nurture poetry in young people and people who were ignored. I have several favorite achievements. Like Ms. Brooks, I liked to give poetry prizes, but mine were of large sums as they were underwritten by people who supported me and had financial resources to show it. 

My whole tenure as Poet Laureate was underwritten by the Community. The McKeevers and Madhbutis contributed to a stellar reading of women poets organized by Laura Kenton. The poets were Ana Castillo, Allison Joseph, Kelly Norman Ellis, Parneshia Jones, Imani Elizabeth Jackson, and me at Saint Benedict the African Church. That Faith Community was the source of my Laureateship funding beyond the state. It led to my fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, and my project through it was Ambassadors of Poetry, younger talented poets who conducted residencies of two – five days throughout the state.

Most significantly, I gave individual awards: 

Dr. William Lawson and Mrs. Rosemary Lawson underwrote a $1,000 prize for undergraduate and graduate students.

Dr. Cynthia Henderson and Mr. Prentiss Jackson underwrote a $1,000 prize for senior citizens over 70 years old.

And Mr. George E. Jackson underwrote a $1,000 prize for high school seniors for a Woman of Admiration.

I served as the final judge of these prizes, as well as the final judge of the Emerging Writers Contest sponsored by the State Librarian/Secretary of State.

Your work—across poetry, fiction, and drama—often centers Black womanhood, myth,

and spiritual inheritance. What draws you to these themes?

I think it was the September, 1968 poetry issue of Negro Digest that the classic poem “I Am a Black Woman” by Mari Evans graced the cover. That poem moved me as an announcement of my own identity. An awareness of our Black womanhood was common among young Black women. On college campuses, it was usual to see panels on “The Role of the Black Woman in the Revolution.” As a matter of fact, I wrote a series of vignettes with that title that was scheduled to appear in Black World Magazine in April 1976. But Black World was canceled that month, and my contribution to the early days of Black feminism went unrecorded. In Make/n My Music, a poem written in 1969 but not published until 1974, I talk about the transition from being a colored girl to a Black woman. In July 1968, I washed my hair and my Cousin Willie Mae sculpted it into an Afro never to see a straightening comb again and never to be relaxed. I have never abandoned my Black womanhood to try to please or appease anyone else. And I never will. 

I always find something to explore in the experience of Black womanhood, for as someone once said, “When America catches a cold, Black America catches the flu.’ In addition, we have a rich legacy of creativity and the gift of laughter.  We sure need these attributes.

I had a race consciousness in childhood,  but it was in my undergraduate years at Northwestern that I developed an interest in African mythology. In the Africana section of the NU library, I read about Shango and Obatala and other orisha. In 1977, at FESTAC 77 in Lagos, Nigeria, I began a series of poems about an African deity who would be Shango. This series ran the course of three years. In 1980, I transformed the poems into my play Shango Diaspora: An African-American Myth of Womanhood and Love. My sister Betty Jean and producer Woodie King had encouraged me to make that step into playwriting. In my latest book, More Than Meat and Raiment, I explored Hausa mythology. I used to read The City Where Men Are Mended to my summer high school students.  Wish Bone Wish is the story of two mothers and their kinds of love and the results of each. Love is the current that runs through my themes of Black womanhood, myth, and spiritual inheritance.

I grew up on a street of churches. Next door was the Missionary Baptist Church, which I visited with my Baptist best friend Bunny. We had friends who belonged to the Pentecostal church a few doors down. We danced outside the open doors of the Sanctified church. But most of all, my family was devoutly Catholic. Our church was on the corner. But more than that, we were Christians. To be a follower of Christ is to be committed to love and social justice. My identity, interest in African myth, and spiritual inheritance are all rooted in love, the power of love. A love for all humankind, a recognition of the sacredness of each person, a faith in God, and my history has taught me the hope of something better.

In a 2012 interview, you said your advice to young writers is “Don’t try to become a writer unless you have to. The most important things are to write and read and write and read and live and love and just try to tell the truth.” Why did you have to become a writer?

As Robert Hayden wrote, “Know that love has chosen you.” I had no choice. I was chosen. I wanted to be a writer when I was ten. I was attracted to poetry the first time I read a poem in first grade. I wanted to be a writer like Jo in Little Women. But I wandered away after Beneatha in A Raisin in the Sun. Then I wanted to be a doctor, and people approved. Chemistry and calculus cured me of that misconception. All I was compelled to do was write in my felt notebook and read Black poetry and other poetry. I went to OBAC, and the NU library had a poetry room where I cloistered myself for hours. There and Africana. My roommate, Roella Henderson, encouraged me to show my poems to Hoyt W. Fuller, Editor of Negro Digest, soon to be Black World. He invited me to OBAC, where I might be judged by my peers. He considered Carolyn Rodgers, Don L. Lee, Johari Amini, and others my peers. OAC was a critical environment, but it was clear they had a mission.

You often reference that much of your early work was shaped in the OBAC Writers Workshop. What influence did that community have on your artistic development and your worldview?

I was shaped by the Organization of Black American Culture Writers Workshop’s goals and philosophy of creating work to, for, and from Black people in a critical environment in search of a Black Aesthetic.

If you could make any activity an Olympic sport, what would you get a gold medal in?

I would give Simone Biles a run for her money in grace, balance, and intricacy.

How can people support you right now?

People can buy my books and ask book clubs to feature my work. Ask me to do readings over Zoom. Support me for fellowships and awards.

Name another Black woman writer people should know.

People should know the young poet Imani Elizabeth Jackson. She has already been awarded the C.D. Wright Award, and she has published in Poetry. Her upcoming volume is Flag. Yes, she is my niece. Tara Betts has been around a while. Check her out in Break the Habit, and Refuse to Disappear.

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