Engaging people with poetry

Illinois Poet Laureate Angela Jackson fell in love with poetry at a tender age, thanks to a poem called "Eletelephony" by Laura Elizabeth Richards, which begins: "Once there was an elephant/Who tried to use the telephant."

"The musicality, the rhyme," Jackson said. "I was in love."

When Jackson was 8 years old, she wrote a poem for her mother who "jumped for joy." Within a few years, Jackson knew she wanted to be a writer, inspired by Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women. Jackson became an accomplished poet, novelist and playwright.

Born in Mississippi and raised on the south side of Chicago, Jackson is the fifth of nine children in a family who moved to Chicago during the Great Migration, a decades-long movement of Black Americans from the South to places with more economic and social opportunities, mostly in the Northeast and urban Midwest.

One catalyst for her poetry was summer trips to Mississippi, where she saw segregation very publicly displayed.

"It was a harsh encounter," said Jackson, "an in-your-face encounter that made me want to write about it. It was as if the poet or novelist had found her subject."

Inspired by Black poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, a former Illinois poet laureate, issues of social justice have informed Jackson's poetry through the decades. Jackson, though, considers herself mainly a love poet.

Read the full article