Poet Laureate of the State of Illinois Angela Jackson Announces Golden Poets Poetry Contest Winners

About Angela Jackson

Jackson is in her fourth year of her gubernatorial appointment as Poet Laureate of the State of Illinois. The Chicago poet, playwright and novelist is the fifth Illinois Poet Laureate. She has three published chapbooks and four volumes of poetry. She has received numerous honors for both fiction and poetry, including the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Black Excellence Lifetime Achievement Award from the Black Ensemble Theater, the Pushcart Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council. Her poetry collection All These Roads Be Luminous (1998) was nominated for the National Book Award, her debut novel, Where I Must Go (2009) won the American Book Award, and It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time (2015) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry among other awards. Jackson’s recent awards include the 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award from the African American Arts Alliance’s Black Excellence Awards, the Poetry Foundation’s 2022 Ruth Lily Poetry Prize Award, most recently, The African America Literature and Culture Society’s Darwin Turner Award in recognition of her contributions to literature. Jackson also participates in the Illinois Humanities’ Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Poetry Awards program and currently serves in residence with Illinois Humanities. 

About the other Judges

Whittney Jones
Jones is the author of The Old Works (The Heartland Review Press, 2019), a poetry chapbook. Her poems have been published in Blackbird, Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, Third Coast, and RHINO, among others. She was winner of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award in the 2014 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition.

Joseph Dominic Saunders
Saunders is a talented poet, teacher and mentor to youth of all ages throughout the City of Chicago and beyond. As an Ambassador of Poetry, he goes beyond conducting numerous residencies throughout Chicago exposing youth to various poets and encouraging them to create their own poems.

Imani Elizabeth Jackson
Jackson is a young award-winning new poet working across various disciplines. She is the author of Flag (forthcoming from Futureppoem, September 2024) and the chapbooks Context for arboreal exchanges (Belladonna 2023) and saltsitting (g l o s s, 2020). Among her awards are a 2023 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, Futurepoem’s 2020 Other Futures Award and the 2020 CD Wright Prize. 

About Illinois Humanities

Illinois Humanities, the Illinois affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is a statewide nonprofit organization that activates the humanities through free public programs, grants, and educational opportunities that foster reflection, spark conversation, build community, and strengthen civic engagement. We provide free, high-quality humanities experiences throughout Illinois, particularly for communities of color, individuals living on low incomes, counties and towns in rural areas, small arts and cultural organizations, and communities highly impacted by mass incarceration. Founded in 1974, Illinois Humanities is supported by state, federal, and private funds. Stay connected with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn @ILHumanities.

About the Office of the Illinois Poet Laureate

The modern office of the laureate was established in seventeenth-century England. Then, the laureate's primary duty was to sing the praises of royalty and to celebrate their state occasions, to be, as it were, a court poet. Thankfully, that role was abolished in the early 1800s. In America, our state and national laureates have been asked to devise their own programs for promoting the art of poetry among the populace.

In Illinois, the office of the Poet Laureate hopes to undertake projects that will make poetry more available and more accessible to people in their everyday lives. The notion here is similar to that of poet Marianne Moore, who remarked that reading poetry, even "with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in / it after all, a place for the genuine." An ambassador for poetry, the Laureate promotes citizens' awareness of poetry as well as heightens their appreciation of the art form. In sum, the Laureate strives to forge a meaningful communion between poetry and the state's populace.

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