Write for salvation
Mitchell S. Jackson was 15 years old when he started selling crack cocaine in Northeast Portland. Stick-thin and baby-faced, he hustled his way through high school and continued to deal drugs when he started college at Portland State.
He was making $4,000 a night, “the kind of money that no degree I was going to earn could make me,” he says. A year into his bachelor’s degree, he was arrested for possession of a gun and crack — a lot of crack. While serving his 16-month prison sentence, he started what would become his first novel, “The Residue Years.”
Writing put him on a new path from drug dealer and prison inmate to published author and college professor.
“I feel like my book is my salvation,” he says. “I was an average Black man, but the book makes me more than average.”
He grew up in a single-parent home amid adults who were in and out of prison, then selling drugs and serving his own time, a fate that disproportionately falls on young Black men in America.
His life as a writer began at PSU, where he earned a bachelor’s in speech communication in 1999 and a master’s in writing in 2002. He felt like he was behind other students when he started his graduate program, but “I saw the work other people were producing and felt like I could catch up. That heartened me. I started to think I could really be a writer.”
He returned to the novel he started in prison after he moved to New York for a second master’s program in creative writing. There, he wrote, revised, rewrote and re-revised “The Residue Years” until finally an agent agreed to pitch it to publishers.
The novel won glowing reviews and led to a second book, “Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family,” a memoir. Most recently he won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for his essay in Runner’s World about the life and death of Ahmaud Arbery. He now is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Chicago.
Growing up in Northeast Portland in the 1990s, everyone had a dream of getting out, Jackson says in his documentary about his life, also titled “The Residue Years.”
“The expectation is that you’re not going to make it,” he says. “I made my way through life like that until I realized I could be great.”