Survival Math
Presented in partnership with the Black Arts Matter Festival. Mitchell S. Jackson’s award-winning first book, The Residue Years, was celebrated as “a powerful debut that takes a raw, hard look at poverty” (Roxane Gay, New York Times Book Review), and the marker of “a fresh new voice in fiction” (O, The Oprah Magazine). With his new book, Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family, Jackson turns his distinctive and compelling voice to nonfiction, telling the story of his own family and his tumultuous youth in Portland, Oregon.
Part self-reflection and part social critique, Survival Math illuminates the systemic forces of race and class that have shaped the lives of countless disenfranchised Americans, through the history of one family. In four parts, Jackson crafts expansive, multifaceted responses to four questions: Who are we? What have we learned? What have we endured? and How do we proceed? The day-to-day calculations of how to survive in a struggling community loom large over his answers, but so too do poetry, familial love, and a profound rethinking of masculinity and fatherhood. What emerges is a candid, lyrical, and thrillingly alive portrait of a family, a community, and a nation that still needs to reckon with its own history.
Doors will open for this event at 5:30 PM. The event is free and open to the public. Seating will be by general admission.
Mitchell Jackson
Mitchell S. Jackson’s acclaimed debut novel The Residue Years won the Whiting Award and the Ernest Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence, and was a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Jackson’s honors include fellowships from TED, the Lannan Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Center for Fiction. His writing has appeared in publications such as The New York Times Book Review, Salon, and Tin House. He serves on the faculty at NYU and Columbia University.