Kosoko Jackson Books in Order

Kosoko Jackson was born and raised in the DC metro area, and stories seem to have been part of his life almost from the beginning. He has said he wrote his first story at six, about kindergartners and a bear, which is a pretty good early hint of the mix you still find in his work: feeling, danger, and a little mischief.

Before novels became the thing most readers knew him for, Jackson built a career in digital communications and digital storytelling. He has also worked as a sensitivity reader and a freelance political journalist. He has spent time working across email, social, and SMS marketing too, fields where voice and timing matter every day. That background helps explain why his fiction often moves fast, notices how power works, and stays alert to the gap between public image and private fear.

That mix matters.

He writes across young adult and adult fiction, and he moves easily between romance, thriller, horror, and fantasy. The settings change, but the heartbeat stays familiar. Again and again, Jackson centers Black queer characters and lets them be funny, ambitious, awkward, scared, romantic, and fully human. His stories like big hooks, but they do not forget the people inside them.

For many readers, Yesterday is History was the book that introduced him. It follows Andre Cobb, a teen who gains the ability to move through time after a liver transplant, and Jackson uses that speculative setup to tell a warm, aching story about healing and first love. In Survive the Dome, he turns toward near-future suspense, trapping aspiring journalist Jamal Lawson inside a militarized dome over Baltimore during protests against police brutality.

Then he goes darker. The Forest Demands Its Due drops Douglas Jones into an elite Vermont boarding school where students can vanish so completely that even memory gives way. The Macabre pushes further into adult speculative fiction, sending painter Lewis Dixon into a hunt for cursed artwork tied to family history, magic, and art's power to wound as much as it reveals. Even with bigger premises, Jackson keeps the emotions close.

He can also be very funny.

His adult romances, I'm So (Not) Over You and A Dash of Salt and Pepper, show how comfortable he is with banter, second chances, and sharp character chemistry. The first plays with fake dating as Kian Andrews gets pulled back into the orbit of his ex, Hudson Rivers. The second brings Xavier Reynolds home to Maine, where a restaurant job puts him on a collision course with chef and single dad Logan O'Hare. In 2023, I'm So (Not) Over You won a Lambda Literary Award.

Jackson has long been outspoken about diversity in young adult literature, and that interest in representation is not some extra message taped onto the books after the fact. It is part of the engine. He has written essays and short fiction, and in 2018 he received a GLAAD Rising Stars grant that he used to create a mentorship program for queer authors. That sense of community building sits beside the fiction, not apart from it.

These days, Jackson has been based in the New York metro area. Outside books, his bios mention movies, video games, pop music, and a golden retriever named Artemis. That all feels in character for a writer who can move from YA time travel to rom-com to horror without sounding like he wandered into the wrong room.