ASP Welcomes Poet Reuben Jackson!
We at Alan Squire Publishing are excited to announce the end of Reuben Jackson’s poetry publishing hiatus! Next autumn a new collection by the acclaimed poet, jazz scholar, and radio personality will be released through ASP and available everywhere. The new release will include the full text of the Columbia Award Winning fingering the keys and a collection of entirely new work.
Reuben Jackson and ASP have history dating back before the inception of the press. Reuben and ASP co-founder, Rose Solari, were label mates at Gut Punch Press a now defunct indie publishing house out of DC. Both were awarded, in subsequent years, the prestigious Columbia Book Award for their first publications, Rose Solari for Difficult Weather and Reuben Jackson for fingering the keys. Ever since, they have been great friends and supporters of one another’s work. If you’d like to hear their chemistry in action, the new ASP Podcast featuring Reuben Jackson is up on our Soundcloud here.
This week we will be celebrating the incredible Reuben Jackson, the man, the poet, the scholar, and we will be teasing his new collection, so do stay tuned!
Reuben Jackson served as curator of the Smithsonian’s Duke Ellington Collection in Washington, D.C. for over twenty years. His music reviews have been published in the Washington Post, Washington City Paper, Jazz Times, and on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Jackson is also an educator and mentor with The Young Writers Project. He taught poetry for 11 years at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland and taught high school for two years in Burlington, Vermont. His poems have been published in over 40 anthologies; his first volume is fingering the keys, which Joseph Brodsky picked for the Columbia Book Award. Reuben Jackson is currently an archivist with the University of the District of Columbia’s Felix E. Grant Jazz Archives. From 2013 until 2018, he was host of Friday Night Jazz on Vermont Public Radio.