Jackie Wang
Jackie Wang | |
|---|---|
| Academic background | |
| Education | New College of Florida (B.A., 2010) Harvard University (M.A., 2018; Ph.D., 2020) |
| Doctoral advisor | Elizabeth Hinton |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | American Studies and Ethnicity |
| Institutions | University of Southern California |
| Website | https://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/ase/faculty_display.cfm?person_id=1105385 |
Jackie Wang is an American poet and scholar of the political economy of prisons and surveillance. In 2021 she was a National Book Award finalist in poetry for her book The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void.[1]
Biography
Wang grew up in Florida. Her brother was incarcerated when she was 16.[2] She is a harpist.[1]
Career
Wang completed her PhD in African and African American Studies in 2020 at Harvard University with Elizabeth Hinton as her advisor.[2][3]
As a PhD candidate, Wang published her first nonfiction book, Carceral Capitalism, which examines the neoliberal, capitalist incentives to use prisons and other systems of incarceration to manage crisis, specifically with a focus on how race influences these processes.[4][5] She considers topics including municipal finance, debt economies, and the concept of innocence in her analyses, combining both poetry and autobiography into passages.[6][5] In an interview with Tank Magazine, she noted "I wasn’t simply positing mass incarceration as an effect of the economy, but I wanted to think about the relationship between what’s happening in the economic sphere and the carceral sphere. I also wanted to bridge two different ways of looking at anti-black racism."[2] Her analysis in Carceral Capitalism has been compared to the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore.[6][7]
Her first full-length poetry collection The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Poetry and the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry.[1][8] As with others works by Wang, the collection is focused on dreams and dreaming, taking her own dreams as inspiration.[9] A reviewer for The Nation noted, “If there is a formula to what she does throughout the course of this book, it is taking us out of our world and then placing us back in it, changed.”[10]
Wang is an assistant professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California.[3] She identifies as a prison abolitionist.[11]
Bibliography
Poetry
Collections
- A Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void, Nighboat Books, 2021. ISBN 9781643620367
Chapbooks
- Curated by Tamryn Spruill, The Twitter Hive Mind is Dreaming, Robocup Press. 2018 ISBN 9781388878153
- Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb (published in collection Say Bye to Reason and Hi to Everything edited by Andrew Durbin), Capricious, 2016. ISBN 9780997444605
Non-fiction
- Contributor, Technoprecarious, MIT Press, 2020. ISBN 9781912685981
- Carceral Capitalism, MIT Press, 2018. ISBN 9781635900026
References
- ^ a b c "Jackie Wang". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 22 October 2022.
- ^ a b c Stallard, Natasha (23 May 2018). "Jackie Wang". Tank Magazine. Retrieved 22 October 2022.
- ^ a b "Jackie Wang". University of Southern California. Retrieved 22 October 2022.
- ^ Wang, Jackie (2018). Carceral Capitalism. MIT Press. ISBN 9781635900026.
- ^ a b Buna, M (13 May 2018). "Carceral Capitalism: A Conversation with Jackie Wang". LA Review of Books. Retrieved 22 October 2022.
- ^ a b Hull, Alexandra (August 2019). "Jackie Wang: Carceral Capitalism". Art Monthly (428): 33. Retrieved 22 October 2022.
- ^ Kilgore, James (12 August 2018). ""Exhaling a Low Freedom Song": Jackie Wang on Carceral Capitalism". Truthout. Retrieved 22 October 2022.
- ^ "Current Finalists". Lambda Literary. Retrieved 22 October 2022.
- ^ Auerbach, Amanda (10 March 2021). "Jackie Wang's The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us From the Void". The Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved 22 October 2022.
- ^ Ballard, Thea (26 August 2021). "Jackie Wang's Dream Poetics". The Nation. Retrieved 22 October 2022.
- ^ "Jackie Wang". MIT Press. Retrieved 22 October 2022.