New Novel About a Young Black Woman Who Enters an Elite, Predominantly White University in the Late 1960s

Angela Jackson, a poet and professor of African-American literature at Kennedy-King College in Chicago, has published her first novel. The book, Where I Must Go, tells the story of a working-class African American who enrolls at an elite university in the late 1960s. Although the school is named Eden University, it is clear from the details in the novel that the author is describing her alma mater, which is Northwestern University.

Professor Jackson says the novel is part autobiography and part fiction. She entered Northwestern in 1968 but did not graduate until 1977. She later earned a master’s degree in Latina American and Caribbean studies at the University of Chicago.