On June 11, 2021, Mitchell Jackson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for his essay on the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a young Black man who was chased down by three white men and shot to death while out for a jog near Brunswick, Georgia in February 2020. The essay, entitled Twelve Minutes And A Life, appeared in Runner’s World.

In this conversation with Nantucket Book Foundation co-founder Mary Haft, Jackson takes us in to a life lived as a child in Portland and the emergence of his voice as a writer and his work as an author. (52 min)

We revisited Jackson after his initial conversation with Mary Haft to weigh in on this seismic moment in American history. (4 min 17 sec)

His novel, The Residue Years, is a raw exploration of the profound and complicated relationship of a mother and her son, against the backdrop of the inexorable pull of addiction and cycle of poverty. In language that is searing and heartbreakingly alive, love shines in the darkest hours.

What is the toughest thing that you survived? That is the question and the starting point of Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family. This nonfiction series of essays is an exploration of ideas, of the calculation of survival, of the connective thread of family and community; a complex web that encompasses race, inequality, prison, poverty, violence, addiction, and the choices made in the hustle of life.

Literature is humanity’s great call. Mitchell Jackson answers that call with honesty and blistering truth that cracks open a world we enter through the pages of his books.