Mitchell S. Jackson

Mitchell S. Jackson is the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and the 2021 National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. His debut novel The Residue Years (Bloomsbury, 2013) received wide critical praise and won The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. It was also 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.

His nonfiction book Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family (Scribner, 2019) was named a best book of the year by numerous publications, including NPR, Time Magazine, the Paris Review, the Root, Kirkus Reviews, and Buzzfeed. He is a columnist for Esquire Magazine.

Jackson's honors include fellowships and awards from the Whiting Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Ford Foundation, PEN America, TED, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Center for Fiction.

He is also a well-regarded speaker who has delivered lectures and keynote addresses all over the world, including at the annual TED Conference, the Ubud (Bali) Writers and Readers Festival, and the Sydney Writers’ Festival, as well as at esteemed institutions, among them Yale University, Brown University, Cornell University, and Columbia University.

A formerly incarcerated person, Jackson is also a social justice advocate who, as part of his outreach, visits prisons and youth facilities in the United States and abroad and is the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University.