_It’s a privilege to make a print magazine in an era when so many great ones have stopped publishing. Since joining the Oxford American editorial team more than four years ago, Danielle Amir Jackson has refused to take that privilege for granted, going to considerable lengths to help the OA not only persist, but also transform and flourish. A lot of people benefited from this deliberate, steadfast ethic: colleagues like me, contributors, legions of Southern artists, and fans of exceptional writing and culture reporting everywhere. Her last day at the OA was Friday; her first book, Honey’s Grill: Sex, Freedom, and Women of the Blues, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.  

In 2021, Jackson became the first Black editor-in-chief of the Oxford American. When talking about a long-running publication that investigates sounds and stories from the American South, the significance of that milestone should never be understated. During her tenure, the OA was honored with the Whiting Foundation's Literary Magazine Prize and was named a finalist for awards from ASME and the James Beard Foundation. She created On Jubilee, an ongoing digital series that commemorates Juneteenth with words, recipes, and visual art. She interviewed authors, music makers, and two members of the Little Rock Nine. Stories from editions she helmed have been adapted and anthologized, pored over and praised. 

It’s not rare for a magazine to open with a letter, a couple of pages where an editor reflects on the labored-over collection ahead. And yet Jackson’s letters transcend preamble, each one a short burst of literature unto itself. She crisscrosses American history with autobiography, weaves cultural references with curatorial insight. Her sentences move like music, fitting for a writer born in Memphis. Images and themes recur like melody: trees, dust, passage, legacy. A selection of her introductions are excerpted below, along with samples of the curated work that inspired them. Re-reading the letters now feels like returning to a song you wish wouldn’t end. Luckily we have the magazines; I can rewind and press play whenever I want.    

— Patrick D. McDermott, multimedia editor

“Blooms, Greens, and Portals” (Summer 2024) 

In our just-released Outside Issue, Jackson introduces readers to “Uncle,” her grandmother’s “regal and mighty” brother who kept gardens and trekked to church on foot. The edition’s focus on the natural world drudged up memories of Uncle’s outdoor rituals, which in turn inspired analysis of Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl:

Jacobs’s “drooping hopes” of escape had come “to life again with the flowers,” she writes. She respects, even reveres the land: At the gravesite of her parents, she is awestruck by the sound of birds keeping watch. Jacobs’s desire for bodily freedom was inextricably linked with an abiding love for her progeny and our planet. I imagine my uncle’s weekly walk to church as another manifestation of that love, passed down—his way of keeping a connection with his lineage, with his own pure soul, with the Lord, and with this planet. 

In this issue: “Dear Queen: The Land That Saved You, Mama” by Tauheed Rahim II

“A Belief in Birds” (Fall 2021)

While working on the Southern Lit Issue, Jackson found meaning in the winged creatures that flit and soar through Toni Morrison’s prose, and in the cosmic, cut-short oeuvre of Henry Dumas. These two writers, she explains, became lamppost-like guides through an issue that showcases the dynamic complexities of Southern literature:       

We wanted to reimagine the canon, revisit classics in new and striking ways, and introduce a new vanguard of literary adventurers, soothsayers, and prophets. We wanted to give our oral traditions a seat of honor; we wanted our music vaunted and the old masters juxtaposed against the newly emergent. We hold dear what Walker wrote in 1975: “I would never be satisfied with a segregated literature. I would have to read Zora Hurston and Flannery O’Connor, Nella Larsen and Carson McCullers, Jean Toomer and William Faulkner.” Difference and multiplicity are key organizing principles of everything we touch.

In this issue: “The Second Sight of Henry Dumas” by Carter Mathes; “Dr. Sandman,” a story by Deesha Philyaw; “The High Shelf,” a story by Dawnie Walton

“Up Above My Head” (Winter 2020)

Guest-edited by Brittany Howard in 2020, the “Greatest Hits” edition of our annual Southern music issue resurfaced some of the best music writing from the OA archive. There were new pieces too, many appearing in a special “Icons” section. Managing Editor at the time, Jackson kicked off the series with an essay that eulogizes Sister Rosetta Tharpe, then wonders what lingers when we leave a place, be it a hometown or the Earth:

These are questions of inheritance. Beyond my eye, beyond the death and decay of matters left behind and unsettled, the music ringing up above my head told a thousand stories of bounty and belonging, and it glimmered in the light.       

In this issue: Harmony Holiday on Florence Price; Gwen Thompkins on Ellis Marsalis; Jamey Hatley on Talibah Safiya

“To the West” (Fall 2022)

In Issue 118, named a notable edition in Best American Essays 2023, Jackson explores “the west” as both a conceptual promised land and a neighboring region with permeable borders, a real place you can see and touch and travel to. She remembers playing Oregon Trail, quotes Ida B. Wells, excerpts a poem from the issue, and traces the treacherous routes traveled by the sixty-thousand Southeastern Americans who were forced westward by the government:

The 2020 Census reported growth among every non-white group of residents in the U.S., including Indigenous households. The balmy December I last saw my father alive, we drove past Pacaha burial mounds near the Hopefield Bend Revetment, a levee on the Mississippi’s Arkansas side. He told me a DNA test had revealed an Indigenous ancestor from the 1700s. Hedin writes, “So much of what is written about the Cherokees tends to emphasize removal.” We should remember that the American South has reams of Indigenous history, dead and alive, to recover, and honor, and connect with.      

In this issue: “Where the Animals Sleep at Night,” a story by Meghan Reed; “Eastman, GA. 2022” by Farah Jasmine Griffin; “Stumbling Stone” by Benjamin Hedin