Joe Jackson

Joe Jackson is the author of one novel and seven nonfiction titles, including The Thief at the End of the World, named one of Time magazine’s Top Ten Books for 2008, and Leavenworth Train, a finalist for the 2002 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime. Jackson holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas and was an investigative reporter for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot for twelve years, covering criminal justice and the state's Death Row. His journalism has resulted in the acquittal of a man wrongly convicted of murder, the federal investigation of a jail in which sixteen prisoners died of medical neglect, and the recantations of two men whose testimony helped send men to Death Row. He is currently the Mina Hohenberg Darden Endowed Professor of Creative Writing in Old Dominion University’s MFA creative writing program. His biography of Sioux holy man Black Elk, known from the oral history Black Elk Speaks, was released by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in October 2016, and was winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, winner of the Society of American Historians' Francis Parkman Prize, winner of the Western Writers of America's Spur Award for Best Biography, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography.