Sandra Jackson-Opoku is the author of the award-winning novel The River Where Blood Is Born, which was listed in Best Novels of the Nineties: A Reader’s Guide. Her novel Hot Johnny (and the Women Who Loved Him) was an Essence Magazine hardcover fiction bestseller.

Her fiction, poetry, essays, reviews, travel articles and dramatic works are widely published and produced. They have appeared in eMerge Magazine, The Plentitudes Journal, Both Sides: Stories from the Border, storySouth, Another Chicago Magazine, New Daughters of Africa, Novus Literary Journal, Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, Taint Taint Taint Literary Journal, and at the Chicago Humanities Festival, Lifeline Theatre, and other outlets. She also co-edited Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks, which was a finalist for the Chicago Review of Books Nonfiction Award.

Jackson-Opoku’s work has earned a US National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship, the American Library Association Black Caucus Award, an Esteemed Literary Artist Award from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, a Pushcart Prize nomination in fiction, the Globe Soup Story Prize, second place in the Plentitudes Journal Fiction Prize, 5^th place in the Institute for Writers First Pages Thriller Contest, the Minotaur Malice Domestic Award for First Mystery, and many other awards and honors, and has been featured in Newcity Lit50: “Who Really Books in Chicago” and the Lifeline Theatre BIPOC Adaptation Showcase. Jackson-Opoku is a Writer’s Discovery Fellow with Circle of Confusion and a recipient of the Hearst Foundation’s James Baldwin Fellowship at MacDowell Arts.

Sandra Jackson-Opoku teaches literature and creative writing at Columbia College Chicago, the University of Chicago Writers Studio, the University of Miami, and Chicago State University. She has been a resident fellow in artist communities such as MacDowell, Hedgebrook, and the Djerassi Foundation, and presents workshops, readings, and literary events in bookstores, schools, libraries, museums and arts organizations throughout the country and around the world.