Tiffany D. Jackson

About Tiffany D. Jackson

Tiffany D. Jackson grew up in Brooklyn Heights, New York, where she knew from an early age that she wanted to be a writer. She attended Hendrick Hudson High School before earning her undergraduate degree in film from Howard University. She later returned to New York to complete a master's degree in Media Studies from The New School. Before establishing herself as a novelist, she built a career in television production, working behind the scenes while writing fiction on the side.

Jackson writes young adult thrillers that center Black girls and young women navigating systems that were never designed to protect or believe them—the criminal justice system, the music industry, the foster care system, and the everyday machinery of a society that renders certain lives invisible. Her fiction is research-intensive: for her debut novel Allegedly, she interviewed lawyers, doctors, social workers, and detectives to understand how the justice system actually processes child defendants. The result is fiction that reads with the urgency and texture of reported nonfiction.

Monday's Not Coming

Jackson's second novel, Monday's Not Coming (2018), was inspired by a real event: the disappearance of more than a dozen Black girls in Washington, D.C. in early 2017, which generated a hashtag—#MissingDCGirls—but almost no mainstream media coverage. Jackson turned that disparity into a psychological thriller about a girl whose best friend vanishes without anyone seeming to notice or care. The novel received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and School Library Journal, was named a School Library Journal Best Book of 2018, and earned Jackson the 2019 Coretta Scott King–John Steptoe Award for New Talent.

Censors and school board challengers have objected to the book's frank subject matter—sexual abuse, neglect, and systemic indifference to missing children—as too disturbing for young readers. Jackson sees it differently: these are the stories young people, particularly young Black women, are already living. Refusing to tell them does not make anyone safer.

A Prolific and Acclaimed Career

Jackson has published broadly acclaimed work across several tonal registers. Grown (2020), about a teenage singer targeted by a predatory music executive, debuted at #4 on the New York Times Young Adult Hardcover bestseller list. White Smoke (2021), her horror debut, reached #6 on the same list. Her debut picture book, Santa in the City (2021), sold in a five-house auction and became a holiday staple. In 2025, she received the Margaret A. Edwards Award, one of the most prestigious honors in young adult literature, recognizing her body of work's significant and lasting contribution to the field.