About Didi

Didi Jackson is a poet who currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband, poet Major Jackson, and her rascally rescue dog, Finn.

She is a Dean's Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University where she teaches as an assistant professor of creative writing. She is the author of two poetry collections, My Infinity (2024) and Moon Jar (2020).

Her poems have been chosen for Best American Poetry, The Slowdown with Tracy K. Smith, and The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-day. Didi's poems have appeared in many magazines and journals including Alaska Quarterly, American Poetry Review, Bomb, The Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, Oxford American, Ploughshares, The Sewanee Review, and The Virginia Quarterly.

Didi grew up in a house on a small lake in Central Florida. For forty years she remained in Florida, kayaking the St. Johns River and hiking past slash pine and saw palmettos. After becoming a widow, she remarried and moved to Vermont. Hiking there involved snowshoes and many many layers. Her work echos the wild spaces she grew up in and has lived in as an adult. Such settings help her to find solace and peace. Her focus on the beyond human world is an important topic of her work. Once she arrived in Tennessee, Didi completed her certification as a Tennessee Naturalist. 

She is not only interested in the natural world and the literary arts, but she has also taught art history. Women artists who have been forgotten or have historically not been given fair representation  inform much of her poetry particularly the poems in her most recent collection, My Infinity.