Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel, The Residue Years (Bloomsbury, 2013), won the Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for the Center for Fiction Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the PEN / Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, and the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award. Jackson’s honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, PEN America, TED, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Center for Fiction. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the New Yorker, Harper’s, the New York Times Book Review, the Paris Review, the Guardian, Tin House, and elsewhere. His nonfiction book Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family is forthcoming from Scribner. He is a Clinical Associate Professor of Writing in Liberal Studies at New York University.
We are survivors: we the descendants of the Africans who endured the wretched march to the west coast of their continent, brutal confinement, and cruel transatlantic passage, to reach alive—somehow alive—the shores of a new world.
Mitchell Jackson began fastening the hashtag #litlifeislife onto his Instagram posts as early as September 2014. He has since adopted it as his unofficial catchphrase. The slogan is scattered generously across his feed, slapped onto snapshots of colleagues’ newly published books, event posters for upcoming writing festivals, slides announcing literary contest award winners, and—most recently—manuscript stacks of the forthcoming Survival Math fanning across tables and bedsheets.
0 Comments