Sandra Jackson-Opoku is the author of three award-winning novels. The River Where Blood is Born won the American Library Association Black Caucus Award. Hot Johnny and the Women Who Loved Him was an Essence Magazine Bestseller in Hardcover Fiction. Debut mystery novel, Savvy Summers and the Sweet Potato Crimes won the Malice Minotaur Award for First Mystery. Her fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic works are widely published and produced, appearing in Midnight & Indigo, Aunt Chloe, Another Chicago Magazine, New Daughters of Africa, Adi Magazine, Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, About Place Journal, the Chicago Humanities Festival, Lifeline Theatre, and others. She also coedited the anthology Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks.
Jackson-Opoku has scripted original and adapted works for stage and screen. Stage plays include the co-authored Indignant Women: A Conversation with Lorraine Hansberry and Gwendolyn Brooks, and the novel adaptation, Hungry Ghost Festival, a play with music. Her television screenplays have won the Circle of Confusion Writers Discovery Fellowship, and ranked in the quarterfinals of the Stage 32 Diversity Springboard, ScreenCraft Cinematic Prose, We Screenplay Diverse Voices, and M Lab Summer Shorts.
Other professional recognition includes a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an American Library Association Black Caucus Award, the Chicago Esteemed Artist Award, a Lifeline Theatre BIPOC Adaptation Showcase, the Globe Soup Story Award, a Plentitudes Journal Fiction Prize, a Circle of Confusion Writers Discovery Fellowship, the Iceland Writers Retreat Alumni Award, the Hearst Foundation James Baldwin Fellowship at MacDowell Arts, a Pushcart Prize nomination, the Casa África Purorrelato Prize, and the Chicago Sun-Times “Finding Chicago's Next Voices” Award, and the Travis Bogard Fellowship at the Eugene O’Neill Center at Tao.
Sandra Jackson-Opoku taught literature and writing at the University of Miami, Columbia College Chicago, and Chicago State University. She presents workshops, readings, and literary events worldwide.
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Research on Cozies: https://www.sistersincrime.org/page/ARG2021Report#Sandra%20Jackson-Opoku
Frank London Brown, Trumbull Park
Jewell Parker Rhodes, Free Within Ourselves: Fiction Lessons for Black Authors
Storyknife Writers Retreat: https://storyknife.org/
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Crime Writers of Color: https://www.crimewritersofcolor.com/
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Every Fifth Reading Challenge: https://www.sistersincrime.org/page/everyfifth
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