The Joseph Henry Jackson Award is a literary award offered annually to promising young California writers. The award is sponsored by The San Francisco Foundation and administered by Intersection for the Arts. There is no entry fee to apply for this award. Recipients receive $2000.
The award is a memorial to Joseph Henry Jackson, longtime literary editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. Jackson was described as "the greatest bookman west if the Mississippi," and, as Anthony Boucher noted, the only disputed part of the description was its geographical limitation. The award was established after his death in 1955.[1][2]
The award is intended to encourage young writers of an unpublished manuscript that is completed or in-progress. All applicants must, therefore, be between 20 and 35 years of age.
Applicants must be residents of and currently living in northern California (anywhere in California north of the line dividing Monterery County from San Luis Obispo County) or the state of Nevada for three consecutive years immediately prior to the March 31 contest deadline. The unpublished work-in-progress submitted may be fiction (novel or short stories), nonfictional prose, graphic novel, or poetry.
This award is part of the annual Literary Competition administered by Intersection for the Arts' Literary Series. The competition includes two other awards, the James Duval Phelan Award and the Mary Tanenbaum Award. In recent years, several Literary Competition award-winners have secured publishing deals with major publishing houses such as St. Martin’s Press, Simon & Schuster, Random House, and Knopf as a result of these awards. Former award recipients include Philip Levine, Ernest J. Gaines, Al Young, Michael Palmer, Frank Chin, Jane Hirschfield, Lyn Hejinian, David St. John, Dagoberto Gilb, Sallie Tisdale, and Karan Mahajan.