Lawrence Jackson is the author of the award-winning books Chester B. Himes: A Biography (W.W. Norton 2017) and The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics (Princeton 2010). In 2002, he published Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius, 1913-1952 (Wiley), and he has written a memoir on race and family history called My Father’s Name: A Black Virginia Family After the Civil War (Chicago 2012).

Professor Jackson earned a PhD in English and American literature at Stanford University, and he is a 2019 Guggenheim fellowship awardee. A Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and History at Johns Hopkins University, he founded the Billie Holiday Project for Liberation Arts to create opportunities for enhanced intellectual and artistic relations between Hopkins and Baltimore City, his hometown. His new book about his return, called Shelter, was released by Graywolf Press in April 2022.