Word Thursdays featuring Skye Jackson and John Robert Lee

The Bright Hill Press & Literary Center presents Word Thursdays featuring writers Skye Jackson and John Robert Lee.

Skye Jackson was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. She has served as a poetry editor for Bayou Magazine and several other publications. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Green Mountains Review, RATTLE and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, A Faster Grave, won the 2019 Antenna Prize. She was also a finalist for the 2020 RATTLE Poetry Prize. In 2021, she won the AWP Intro Journals Award and was twice nominated for Best New Poets.  Her work was recently selected by former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins for inclusion in the Library of Congress. Poets & Writers has also recognized her as a New Orleans “Poet to Watch.”

JOHN ROBERT LEE (b. 1948) has published several collections of poetry, plus short stories, essays and reviews in scores of journals and international anthologies. Lee’s latest publications are Pierrot (Peepal Tree Press 2020), Saint Lucian Writers and Writing: an author Index of published works of poetry, prose and drama (Papillote Press 2019) and Collected Poems 1975-2015 (Peepal Tree Press 2017). He curates a Caribbean Poetry Portfolio for Acalabash.com where much of his recent work is also published.

He has been a teacher, librarian, radio and TV broadcaster, literary journalist, reviewer, newspaper columnist, actor and director. He presently manages an email list serve to Caribbean writers at home and abroad. He is committed to Caribbean Community.

In 1993, at the launching of a poetry collection by Lee entitled Translations, Nobel laureate Derek Walcott said, “Robert Lee has been a scrupulous poet; that’s the biggest virtue he has, and it’s not a common virtue in poets, to be scrupulous and modest in the best sense, not to over-extend the range of the truth of his emotions, not to go for the grandiose. He is a Christian poet obviously. You don’t get in the poetry anything that is, in sense, preachy or self-advertising in terms of its morality. He is a fine poet.”