Lawrence Jackson

Lawrence Jackson

Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and History

Contact Information

Research Interests: African American Literature, Literary History, Biography, American History

English > People > Lawrence Jackson

Lawrence Jackson is the author of the award-winning books Chester B. Himes: A Biography (W.W. Norton 2017), The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics (Princeton 2010), My Father’s Name: A Black Virginia Family after the Civil War (Chicago 2012) and Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius, 1913-1952 (Wiley 2002). Harper’s Magazine, Paris Review, and Best American Essays have published his criticism and non-fiction.  Professor Jackson earned a Ph.D. in English and American literature at Stanford University and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the William J. Fulbright program.  He began his teaching career at Howard University in 1997 and he is now Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and History at Johns Hopkins University, where he directs the Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts.  His latest books are Hold It Real Still: Clint Eastwood, Race, and the Cinema of the American West (Johns Hopkins University Press 2022) and Shelter: A Black Tale from Homeland, Baltimore (Graywolf 2022). 

In addition to his writing and research, Professor Jackson launched and now serves as director of the Billie Holiday Center for the Liberation Arts, an initiative that showcases the unique arts, history, and culture of Baltimore. Founded in 2017, the project fosters organic links between the intellectual life of Johns Hopkins University and the city’s historic African-American communities, celebrating the strengths and potential of both. The BHCLA serves a cultural purpose, hosting regular events to nurture such connections, as well as an archival one, protecting artifacts of African-American culture and politics.

Writer and historian Lawrence Jackson has recast the study of twentieth-century African-American literature and culture. He is widely known for his extensive scholarship in this field, which includes biographies of Ralph Ellison and Chester B. Himes, as well as a narrative history of mid-century writers.

Jackson’s creative nonfiction work is focused on the structural foundations of racism and inequality. He writes persuasively about the historical forces behind the unrest in the city of Baltimore, including mass incarceration, housing segregation, and disparities in health care and education, and interrogates the discrepancy between the city’s rich history and its current record levels of poverty and alienation. Jackson launched and now serves as director of the Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts, an initiative that showcases the unique arts, history, and culture of Baltimore. The center fosters organic links between the intellectual life of Johns Hopkins University and the city’s historic African-American communities, celebrating the strengths and potential of both. The Billie Holiday Center serves a cultural purpose, hosting regular events to nurture such connections, as well as an archival one, protecting artifacts of African-American culture and politics.

Jackson joined Johns Hopkins University as a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in 2016 from Emory University.

“Letter from Saint James Episcopal,” Paris Review December 2021: 3-14.

“Another Land,” Harper’s Magazine April 2022: 16-18.

"The news that Johns Hopkins’ founder enslaved people isn’t shocking, but it is a call to action," Baltimore Sun, December 10, 2020.

"If Joe Biden is serious about addressing systemic racism, we’ll see it in his task force appointments," Baltimore Sun, November 13, 2020. 

 

Billie Holiday Jazz at Lafayette Square

The Annual Billie Holiday Jazz Concert at Lafayette Square is a musical celebration of the rich and important legacy of Billie Holiday. Located at Lafayette Avenue between Arlington Avenue and Mount Street, Lafayette Square is an anchor of Baltimore’s African American religious life, hosting St. James Episcopal Church, one of the city’s three black congregations dating its origins before the 1830s, St. John’s AME Church, Metropolitan Methodist Church, and Star of Bethlehem Spiritual Temple.  Two of the oldest African American Christian congregations in the United States, Bethel African Methodist Episcopal and Sharp Street United Memorial are only four blocks away.  Billie Holiday herself lived on Argyle Avenue, just off of Lafayette, and the fountainhead of the City’s jazz heritage was at the Royal Theater (1922-1971), located at Pennsylvania and Lafayette Avenue.

The performance will be free and open to the public, with the intention of creating a new center of gravity in Sandtown for three key communities in need of renewed reciprocity and mutuality: the Homewood professional community of students, staff, and faculty, the middle-class African American church community living along the northern boulevards and in Baltimore County, and the contemporary residents of West Baltimore. Our goal is to provide an annual event that allows for engaging social interaction across the boundaries of racial and income-level differences while offering the opportunity to engage in a shared and challenging art form. By taking jazz out from the symphony hall and returning it to its nesting place near Pennsylvania Avenue, we have the chance to deepen our knowledge of the communal creativity of the arts.

The Lost Weekend hosted by Greedy Reads

Baltimore’s historic literary contributions are well known, and it remains still today a city overflowing with creativity and talent, from social and cultural commentary to poetry, to award-winning fiction.

The city’s literary talent is matched by a community of readers who are insatiably curious, hungry for stories, and unapologetically politically and culturally engaged.

THE LOST WEEKEND is three days of culture, books, spoken word, poetry, good food, and good people – hosted by Greedy Reads.