Mitchell S. Jackson has won the Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. Jackson’s debut novel The Residue Years won a Whiting Award and The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. His essay collection Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family was named a best book of 2019 by more than a dozen publications and was later acknowledged as one of the best nonfiction books of the 21st century. Jackson is also the author of Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion, described by The New York Times as “A coffee-table book that elevates the subject to the same decorative status as a Dior or Gucci monograph.” Fly was a USA Today bestseller and won a Booktique Award (honoring the Best Coffee table books of the year). His other honors include a Doctor of Humane Letters from Lewis & Clark College; as well as fellowships, grants, and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, the Cullman Center of the NYPL, the Lannan Foundation, PEN, and TED. Jackson’s writing has been featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Time, Esquire, Marie Claire and Men’s Health, as well as in The New Yorker, Harpers, Harper’s Bazaar, The Paris Review, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Jackson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Esquire. He holds the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professorship in the English Department of Arizona State University.
Jackson is also a well-regarded speaker who has delivered lectures and keynote addresses both in the US and abroad, including the TED Conference, the Ubud (Bali) Writers and Readers Festival, the Sydney Writers’ Festival; the Hegra Conference of Nobel Laureates and Friends; as well as at Yale University, Brown University, Cornell University, Columbia University, Northwestern University, Oberlin College, and UCLA. Jackson is a formerly incarcerated person who engages in outreach in prisons and youth facilities in the United States and abroad.
