Angela Jackson is generally recognized as the most versatile and richly talented of the writers to emerge from Chicago's Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) Writers Workshop during the 1970s. She is the author of three volumes of poems, several short stories, a popular romance (coauthored pseudonymously), and a novel in progress. Despite her versatility, however, she is known primarily as a poet and especially admired for her technically deft, densely metaphorical, and constantly inventive language. She is also celebrated as a brilliant reader of her own poetry and fiction. Apart from her purely literary accomplishments, Jackson is known for her role as the coordinator and sustaining presence in the OBAC Workshop after Hoyt Fuller's departure in 1976.

Jackson, the fifth of nine children, was born in Greenville, Mississippi, to George and Angeline Jackson. Her parents moved to Chicago while she was a small child. Consequently, she grew up...