Naomi Jackson is the author of The Star Side of Bird Hill. Star Side was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the International Dublin Literary Award. She received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 2018. The Black Caucus of the American Library Association named Jackson’s first novel an Honor Book for Fiction.
Jackson studied fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She traveled to South Africa on a Fulbright scholarship, where she received an M.A. in creative writing from the University of Cape Town. A graduate of Williams College, Jackson’s writings have appeared in Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poets & Writers, the Caribbean Writer and Obsidian. She is the recipient of residencies and fellowships from Bread Loaf, MacDowell, Djerassi, Hedgebrook, the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House, and Camargo Foundation. She also has spent time as the visiting writer at Amherst College.
Jackson spent her time in residence at MacDowell in 2017 and 2019 working on her second novel, Behind God's Back. In 2017, she also worked on a screenplay adaptation of her short story, "Ladies."
