Places: Things Heard. Things Seen by Bruce Jackson

This editor has been poaching Bruce Jackson’s memories for ages. His true tales work on their own—Cue reader response: “Bruce Jackson, the great story guy (living and telling) does it again”—but they take on new weight when taken together. Places: Things Heard, Things Seen amounts to an alt left history of American culture since the 50s. The things Jackson’s heard and seen include the folk revival and cinephilia, The Grolier and Attica. Places is a testament to Jackson’s matchless variousness. This politically engaged, ex-Marine aesthete has hung tight with Harvard fellows and Houston DEA agents. Not because he’s a con man out to be on good terms with anyone, but because he means to imagine the real. Pace Camus. Though I should really find a mot from Jackson’s friend Foucault who’s a live presence in Places, along with Robert Lowell, Pete Seeger, Herbert X, Bill Kunstler, Alan Lomax, et al. Jackson’s stories about his companions remind me of that old Beat dream of a book as good as a friend. Places will take you there.

— Benj DeMott, editor First of the Month

Places: Things Heard. Things Seen unveils Bruce Jackson’s extraordinary career as a writer, photographer, and filmmaker. Jackson’s graphic prose and powerful photographs capture his childhood in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn with Jewish grandmothers who spoke German, Yiddish, Russian, and Polish. We follow his travels to Mallorca, France, Italy, Alaska, to Texas prisons and Attica. And we meet his friends--poets Robert Creeley, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell, folklorists Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger, photographer Walker Evans, political activists William Kunstler and Herbert X. Blyden, and film historian James Card. At the age of 82, Jackson recalls his life in prose that is as richly detailed, as are his photographs. Places: Things Heard. Things Seen establishes Bruce Jackson as an American treasure.

— William Ferris, The South in Color: A Visual Journal

Bruce Jackson is an American writer, folklorist, documentary filmmaker, and photographer. He is currently SUNY Distinguished Professor and James Agee Professor of American Culture at University at Buffalo. He is author or editor of 40 books, among which are Wake Up Dead Man: Afro-American Worksongs from Texas Prisons (Harvard, 1972), “Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me”: Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition (Harvard, 1974), The Story is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories (Temple, 2007) and Inside the Wire: Photographs from Texas and Arkansas Prisons (Texas, 2013). His photographs have been widely exhibited. In 2017, New York’s celebrated experimental theater company, The Wooster Group, premiered a play based on his recordings of Afro-American folklore in Texas prisons, The B-Side. New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley named it one of the year’s ten best New York theatrical presentations. In 2018, Aperture Magazine published a profile on his prison photography, by Brian Wallis, “Bruce Jackson: On the Inside.” In collaboration with SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Diane Christian, he has directed and produced five documentary films and written three books. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, was nominated for a Grammy Award, and was named an Associate Member of the Folklore Fellows by the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. The French government appointed him Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2002 and Chevalier in the Ordre national du Mérite in 2012. He has been president of the American Folklore Society, editor of Journal of American Folklore, and member and chair of the board of trustees of the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 314 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-346-1