Mitchell S Jackson Books in Order

Mitchell S. Jackson was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, in a single-parent household. His work returns often to Northeast Portland in the 1990s, a small Black community within a city known for being overwhelmingly white. He writes about the pressures of that world, but also its humor, loyalty, family ties, and ways of getting by.

As a teenager and young adult, Jackson sold drugs and was eventually incarcerated. During his prison sentence, he began writing a fictionalized version of his own life on loose-leaf paper. That early attempt was not a polished plan for a novel, but it gave him a different direction and became the seed of The Residue Years.

Writing became a way to imagine a future beyond the one he knew.

After his release, Jackson studied at Portland State University, earning a degree in speech communication and a master’s degree in writing. He later moved to New York for an MFA in creative writing at New York University. Along the way, he kept returning to the manuscript he had started in prison, revising it again and again until it found its shape.

That book, The Residue Years, was published in 2013. Set in Portland during the crack epidemic, the novel follows Grace, a mother trying to stay clean and reunite her family, and her son Champ, who believes drug dealing is the only way to reclaim their home. Jackson gives both characters room to be loving, frustrated, hopeful, and wrong. The book won the Whiting Award and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence.

His next major book, Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family, shifts from fiction to a more direct examination of his own life. It combines memoir, essays, family history, photographs, and material drawn from historical documents. Jackson looks at addiction, masculinity, violence, incarceration, race, and the idea of hustle, always keeping the focus on the people and systems that shaped his family’s choices.

His work has also moved beyond books. In 2021, Jackson received the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and the National Magazine Award in Feature Writing for reporting on the life and killing of Ahmaud Arbery. He has written essays and journalism for major magazines and newspapers, bringing the same attention to individual lives that readers find in his books.

He writes across forms without leaving his central questions behind.

Jackson is now the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professor of English at Arizona State University. His later work includes Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion, which explores the style history of professional basketball. He also speaks and works with people in prisons and youth facilities. Across fiction, memoir, reporting, and cultural writing, he keeps coming back to family, survival, identity, and the difficult work of making something different from the life you were handed.