Born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, Gary Jackson is the author of the poetry collections small lives, origin story, and Missing You, Metropolis, which received the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. He co-edited The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry, and his poems have appeared in journals including Callaloo, The Sun, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. He’s been published in Shattered: The Asian American Comics Anthology, was featured in the 2013 New American Poetry Series by the Poetry Society of America, been a guest on the BBC News World Service: The Cultural Frontline, and received fellowships and residencies from Cave Canem, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Art Omi. He is the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair of English in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, and the Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.