Spoon Jackson

Spoon Jackson (Stanley "Spoon" Russell Jackson) was born August 22, 1957 in Barstow, California. He began serving a life without possibility of parole sentence in 1978. He has served time in more than a half-dozen California state prisons. He is currently in California State Prison, Los Angeles County.

Spoon began writing poetry during his years at San Quentin State Prison in the 80's. He enrolled in a four-year poetry workshop run by Judith Tannenbaum and discovered himself as a writer. Spoon played Pozzo in the 1988 production of Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot directed by Jan Jonson which brought him international attention. A short documentary was produced about the making of the play by John Reilly and Global Village for The Beckett Project. Spoon served over 12 years in California State Prison, Sacramento (New Folsom), where he was active as a teacher's aid and later had his own writing classes in the Arts In Corrections programs. Since then, Spoon has written plays, poetry, novels, fairy tales, short stories, essays, memoir and he frequently writes articles for magazines. Along with friends from Sweden, Spoon started the "Peace Gang" in order to spread and share his poetry. In October of 2016, Spoon took part in a 15-week creative writing classes in a maximum-security yard at California State Prison, Los Angeles (Lancsster), run by Los Angeles Poet Laureate and renown author Luis J. Rodriguez.

In 2003, Michel Wenzer produced a documentary in Sweden entitled Three Poems by Spoon Jackson. The film included recordings of Spoon reciting his poems, taped from telephone calls. Michel Wenzer completed a full-length documentary (2011) about prisoners in the Art in Corrections program at New Folsom Prison: At Night I Fly. The title comes from one of Jackson's poems, he also features in the film. At Night I Fly won the Swedish Guldbagge Film Award for best documentary of the year 2011. A documentary titled Spoon, by Michka Saäl, premiered in 2015.

"Words of Realness", a suite for chorus and orchestra by Swedish composer Stefan Säfsten based on Jackson's poems, premiered on October 5, 2008 in Kista, Stockholm.

More recent music productions are the album The Prison Music Project (2015), produced by Zoe Boekbinder and Ani DiFranco, and Die Jim Crow (2016) produced by Fury Young.

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