Didi Jackson & Kerrin McCadden

Back Roads Readings was created to bring esteemed poets and writers, both local and regional, to read their work to people in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Readings are followed by a book signing and reception and held on the HCA Main Stage.

Didi Jackson is the author of Moon Jar (2020) and the forthcoming collection, My Infinity (2023.). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review; Kenyon Review; The New Yorker; Ploughshares, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other journals and magazines. She has had poems selected for Best American Poetry; Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day; The Slow Down podcast with Tracy K. Smith, and Together in Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic. She is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and was a finalist for the Meringoff Prize in Poetry. Jackson is Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt and lives in Tennessee and Vermont with her husband, poet Major Jackson.

Kerrin McCadden is the author of American Wake (2021), a finalist for both the New England Book Award and the Vermont Book Award; and Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes (2014), winner of the Vermont Book Award and the New Issues Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Keep This to Yourself (2019), was the winner of the Button Poetry Prize. In 2022 she was the recipient of the Herb Lockwood Prize for artistic excellence that inspires and enriches the community. Recent poems appear in American Poetry Review; Beloit Poetry Journal; New England Review; Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. McCadden is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts; the Vermont Studio Center; and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She teaches at the Center for Technology, Essex, and lives in South Burlington.