Naomi Jackson is author of The Star Side of Bird Hill, published by Penguin Press in June 2015. The Star Side of Bird Hill 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. Star Side was named an Honor Book for Fiction by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was also selected for the American Booksellers Association’s Indies Introduce and Indies Next List programs. The book has been reviewed by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews, NPR.org and Entertainment Weekly, which called Star Side “a gem of a book.” Publishers Weekly named Jackson a Writer to Watch.

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, her work has appeared in literary journals and magazines in the United States and abroad, including The New York Times, Harper’s, The Washington Post, Poets & Writers, and Caribbean Beat. She is the recipient of residencies, grants, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, MacDowell Colony, Camargo Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House, Hedgebrook, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Freya Project.

Jackson is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark. She was a 2021-2022 Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and served as Writer-in-Residence at Queens College. She previously taught at the University of Iowa, University of Pennsylvania, City College of New York, and Oberlin College.

Jackson was born and raised in Brooklyn by West Indian parents.