The Lindsay J. Cropper Memorial Writer Series welcomes Alexis Jackson
Alexis Jackson is the first writer to be featured in the Cropper Series this spring
Alena Botros/Opinion Editor
On Thursday, March 4, the Cropper Series welcomed USD’s very own professor and poet Alexis Jackson for a reading and craft talk as the first event of the spring semester, before students completing the emphasis in creative writing read from their own works.
This past summer, the University of San Diego’s English department released a statement of solidarity, vowing to “reaffirm its commitment to the enduring work of anti-racism.” The department recognizes “the unique capacity of literature to remind us of the innate dignity of all human life” and in that, recognizes the responsibility the department has in the fight against racism.
The Lindsay J. Cropper Center for Creative Writing, established in 2004, announced that this year’s Cropper Memorial Writers Series would be “a celebration of Black creative work exclusively” in hopes to bring an understanding to a collective of human experiences.
Alexis V. Jackson, a Black woman writer and Philadelphia native, earned her MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts in 2018, where she was a Chair’s Fellow. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English with a concentration in writing from Messiah College in 2013.
Jackson’s forthcoming debut collection, “My Sister’s Country,” has been selected as the second place winner of Kore Press Institute’s 2019 Poetry Prize. Jackson currently lectures in the University of San Diego’s English department. She has also taught poetry at Messiah College and served as a reader for several publications, including Callaloo & Bomb Magazine.
Director of the series, Professor Bradley Melekian introduced Jackson by reading emails from her own students, in which “they all spoke to Professor Jackson’s profound dedication to both her students and their craft.” Melekian said. “Here,” they said, “was a woman taking seriously her art and her students’ engagement with it.”
Jackson began by discussing the inspiration behind her collection.
“I wanted to make sure that no person like me looked for language to sustain them, language that was a reflection of them and couldn’t quite find it, not if I could write it,” Jackson said. “This, however, meant tackling shame as it has for some ways all Black women writers.”
Jackson explained what this shame entailed, giving her audience an insight into her life and therefore into her writing.
“The shame I and almost all of the women I knew were made to feel about the texture of their hair, the subject of their school essays, the way they wrote, the shape of their bodies, their righteous anger being called scary,” Jackson said. “So, what this first collection is, is me trying to fit everything into one book of poem, all of it.”
She discovered in her “embracing and rejecting of poetic form, embracing and rejecting the the great white poets, embracing and rejecting the Jesus she was given, embracing and rejecting my inherited racial and gender shame,” was that her work was preoccupied with reimaging as is her legacy as a Black woman artist in this country.
Jackson moved to a reading and discussion of a Nikki Giovanni, a poet and writer at the forefront of the Black Arts movement, poem in hopes to, “usher (us all) into a space where (we) can see the work that came in from which I am writing and the work I see myself in communication and conversation with.”
Giovanni’s poem “A Lady Whose Voice I Like,” is an example of the re-imaging Jackson discusses. In the poem, Giovanni takes a familiar text from scripture and replaces herself with Christ. Who the devil is, is unknown, but the devil uses language that is dialect.
As the text involves the devil’s temptation of Christ, in replacing herself with Christ she in turn is representing the resisting of shame through the devil’s temptation. She reimagines, reshapes, and reforms the text in hopes to demonstrate the resistance of shame Black women face.
Later, Jackson introduced some of her own work from her collection which will debut in the fall of 2021. She read from her “Fresh Princess Sonnets,” from which attendees learned that she wanted to preserve Black vernacular, Philly vernacular, and “give Philly Black folk literature.” The sonnets exemplify who Jackson is as a Black woman from Philadelphia and her lived experiences. She uses her culture, the world around her, significant people and events, provoking thoughts and feelings, to construct these sonnets.
During the question and answer portion, Jackson said, like many others, she was overwhelmed in the beginning of the pandemic and struggled to write, but she forced herself to really sit down and write.
Jackson explained the way she was able to overcome this challenge was by waking up a “little earlier and writing for thirty minutes, sometimes it’s poetry and sometimes it’s not, but at least the writing is happening.”
Since its inception in 2004, the Cropper Center has prioritized bringing a diversity of voices to our campus.