Consider This with Mitchell S. Jackson

Our 2021–22 Consider This series, American Dreams, American Myths, American Hopes, kicks off October 13 with a conversation with writer Mitchell S. Jackson, author of Survival Math and The Residue Years. Join us for a live virtual conversation on self-determination, family, and redemption with Jackson and Adam Davis, executive director of Oregon Humanities.

The program will begin at 5:00 p.m. Pacific on Wednesday, October 13, and will be streamed live on YouTube and on [the Oregon Humanities] page. Following the panel’s discussion, at 6:00 p.m., viewers may join other participants in facilitated conversations on Zoom. To participate in the second part of the program, please RSVP here.

Mitchell S. Jackson was born and raised Portland, Oregon. His work explores his hometown, including the systemic forces that shaped his community, his family, and his early life. That exploration began with his debut novel, The Residue Years, and continued in his second book, Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family. In his hybrid nonfiction, Jackson examines the hardships that shaped his life, his family, and his community. The book serves as a cultural critique of the racial history of Oregon, American whiteness, mass incarceration, sex work, violence, and broken families—phenomena of which Jackson is intimately familiar—and ultimately presents a microcosm of the forces blighting the lives of untold disenfranchised Americans.

In 2021, Jackson was awarded a Pulitzer Prize and a National Magazine Award for his profile of Ahmoud Arbery in Runner’s World. His writing has been featured on This American Life, on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, Time Magazine, Esquire Magazine, and Marie Claire Magazine, as well as in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar Magazine, The Paris Review, The Washington Post Magazine, The Guardian, and Oregon Humanities. His next novel, John of Watts, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Consider This is made possible thanks to the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Oregon Cultural Trust, Northwest Natural, Tonkon Torp LLP, Stoel Rives LLP, the Kinsman Foundation, and the City of Portland’s We Are Better Together program.