Brandeis Magazine

By David Eisenberg

Poet Jackson Holbert ’17 says that, unlike the “famous triple majors,” he entered his first year at Brandeis laser-focused, ready to pursue the only thing he felt he wasn’t “terrible at.”

“All I wanted to do was creative writing,” he remembers. As a student, he would actually feel the compulsion to create as a strain in his shoulders, as if the idea for a poem was lodged somewhere between his head and hands.

“Then I would write and write, and eventually that tension would dissipate,” he says. “That would be when I knew: I’ve done all I can with this poem.”

Since graduation, Holbert’s work has been published by FIELD, The Nation, and Poetry magazine. And his debut collection of poetry, “Winter Stranger,” won the 2022 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the culmination of an annual contest sponsored by literary publisher Milkweed Editions. Holbert received a $10,000 award, and Milkweed released the collection as a book in June.

Contest judge and poet Henri Cole called the “Winter Stranger” poems — many of them a series of meditations on the opioid crisis in rural eastern Washington, where Holbert grew up — a “beautiful” record of the “tumult, the solemnity, and the spiritual survival of a young man.” The collection also features poems that examine life and death during World War I.

“What makes a good poem, for me,” says Holbert — one of Brandeis’ 2023 BOLD 9 honorees — “is if I feel like I should memorize it, if I feel like I want to keep it with me at all times.”

A 2021-23 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Holbert is working on another poetry collection and a handful of other projects, including a work of nonfiction and a graphic novel.

“I’ll get a sense I want to write a poem about a specific era or event, and then I’ll do a lot of research to figure out what stands out to me in that period,” he says. “Right now, I’m working on a series of poems about Marie Curie and X-ray technology in World War I.”

In the acknowledgments section in “Winter Stranger,” Holbert thanks Brandeis’ English and creative writing departments for helping him develop his gift.

“They showed me what it’s like to be passionate about all literature,” he says. “And how much joy that passion can bring you.”