Portland-Born Author Mitchell S. Jackson Has Won a Pulitzer Prize

The winning essay chronicles the life of Ahmaud Arbery and the racist history that has kept running an overwhelmingly white pastime.

Mitchell-Jackson_Photo_Credit-John-Ricard1 Mitchell Jackson. IMAGE: John Ricard.
By Shannon Gormley

Among the Pulitzer Prize winners announced today is Portland-born author Mitchell S. Jackson.

Jackson won this year’s Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for “Twelve Minutes and a Life,” a long-form piece published in Runner’s World that chronicles the life and murder of Ahmaud Arbery and the racist history that has kept running an overwhelmingly white pastime.

“Ahmaud Arbery, by all accounts, loved to run but didn’t call himself a runner. That is a shortcoming of the culture of running,” Jackson writes. “That Maud’s jogging made him the target of hegemonic white forces is a certain failure of America.”

Now based in New York, Jackson often writes about his Oregon roots.

In 2019, Jackson released Survival Math: Notes on an All American Family, a widely acclaimed collection of essays about growing up in Northeast Portland. His autobiographical novel, The Residue Years, also deals with his childhood in 1990s Portland.

Last year, Jackson told WW that he’s working on a book about the 1965 Watts Rebellion.

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