Kara Jackson’s Plaintive, Playful Folk Songs

Kara Jackson, a twenty-three-year-old Illinois native, is one such poet and songwriter. A graduate of the esteemed Oak Park and River Forest High School poetry program, Jackson became the National Youth Poet Laureate in 2019, at the age of nineteen. The same year, she published a chapbook, “Bloodstone Cowboy,” in which she wrote about her family’s Southern roots (her father was born and raised in Dawson, Georgia), her capacious experience of Black womanhood, and small moments of pleasure that she made seem larger than life. In one poem, titled “anthem for my belly after eating too much,” the narrator looks in the mirror after eating chips and whittles her mixed feelings into a resolution: if all is expanding, all is possible.