A staple of the poetry community for over 2 decades, Donny Jackson is also a doctor of clinical psychology, and a multiple Emmy-winning Producer and Director in unscripted television, including CNN’s United Shades of America with W. Kamau Bell, R&B Divas for TV One, The Bachelor for ABC, A&E’s Teach, and Inside the Label for BET. Dr. Donny is also an NAACP Image Award winner for his producing duties on TV One’s music documentary series, Unsung.

As a spoken word artist, Donny has featured at the Ink Slam Festival, the L.A. Get Down Festival, the Pan African Film Festival, and on dozens of stages throughout the United States, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, the legendary Nuyorican Poets Café, throughout California, and, internationally, Toronto, Canada. In print media, his poetry has been featured in multiple anthologies, including: The Border Crossed Us (An Anthology to End Apartheid), Skin to Skin: A Publication for Women of the LBGTQ Community, Incandescent Mind, La Bloga’s Best Poems of 2015 and -2017, and the coming Garden of Black Joy (Fall 2019).

In addition to literally thousands of haiku and longform poems on love and loss and all other things personal, Donny’s work as a poet explores subjects both highlighted by and hidden from the headlines such as: missing black and indigenous women in the Americas, the tragedy in Sri Lanka, the church burnings in Louisiana, Notre Dame, Ashanti Carmon, the Boko Haram kidnappings, Cyntoia Brown, Dajerria Becton, Flint, Habtom Zerham, Jordan Edwards, Junot Diaz, Kalief Browder, Karyn Washington, Kerrice Lewis, Megan Williams, Nigeria and Somalia bombings, Nia Wilson, Sandra Bland, Shannan Gilbert, Tamir Rice, Terrence Crutcher, Tyshawn Lee, and the Yazidis.

On record, he is a featured poet on Tshaka Campbell’s spoken word album, Skin, as well as with poet Ursula Rucker on Vancouver deep house artist Jaidene Veda’s acclaimed album, Wanderlust.

Dr. Donny also appears in multiple spoken word videos for Da Poetry Lounge, Commoners & Kings, and Word of Art. His one-man, multi-character spoken word play, One Man Shown, debuted at the Greenway Court Theatre in 2013. Donny’s recent spoken word play, salome: ten poems about one thing, premiered to a sold-out house at the L.A. Get Down Festival in April 2019.