Ashley M. Jones Presents Poetry Reading at Huntingdon College

Currently living in Birmingham, Ala., Ashley M. Jones is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, a board member of the Alabama Writers Cooperative and the Alabama Writers Forum, co-director of PEN Birmingham, and a faculty member in the creative writing department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts. She also serves as a guest editor for Poetry Magazine’s May, June, and July/August 2021 issues.

The author of three poetry collections, her debut collection, “Magic City Gospel,” was published by Hub City Press in January 2017, and won the silver medal in poetry in the 2017 Independent Publishers Book Awards. Her second book, “dark // thing,” won the 2018 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry from Pleiades Press. Her third collection, “REPARATIONS NOW!”  is forthcoming in fall 2021 from Hub City Press. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including CNN, the Academy of American Poets, POETRY, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Steel Toe Review, Fjords Review, Quiet Lunch, Poets Respond to Race Anthology, Night Owl, The Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, pluck!, Valley Voices: New York School Edition, Fjords Review: Black American Edition, PMSPoemMemoirStory (where her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2016), Kinfolks Quarterly, Tough Times in America Anthology, and Lucid Moose Press’ Like a Girl: Perspectives on Femininity Anthology.

Ms. Jones’ work has received critical acclaim and has been recognized with many awards, including selection as a finalist in the 2015 Hub City Press New Southern Voices Contest, the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award Contest, and the National Poetry Series. She received a 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a 2015 B-Metro Magazine Fusion Award. Her work was recognized in the 2014 Poets and Writers Maureen Egen Writer’s Exchange Contest and the 2015 Academy of American Poets Contest at Florida International University. She won the 2018 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize from Backbone Press and the 2019 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Ms. Jones was awarded a Poetry Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and was honored with the 2020 Alabama Author award from the Alabama Library Association. She was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship in 2020.

Ms. Jones earned her Master of Fine Arts in poetry from Florida International University, where she was a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellow. She served as Official Poet for the City of Sunrise, Florida’s Little Free Libraries Initiative, from 2013 to 2015, and served as an editor of PANK Magazine.

Huntingdon College continues a legacy of faith, wisdom, and service through a liberal arts academic tradition grounded in the Judeo-Christian heritage of the United Methodist Church.

###