Ashley Jones
Poet
REPARATIONS & OTHER MATTERS OF IMPORTANCE
On this episode of Badass Black Girl, we are featuring Ashley M. Jones, badass prizewinning poet, as she reads six poems from her three collections of poetry, Magic City Gospel, dark//thing, and her forthcoming collection REPARATIONS NOW! Jones’s poems touch on historical anger and the pain of injustices suffered by our Black ancestors, pay homage to her foremothers in a reimagination of the Virgin Mary, stop for a moment on an Alabama highway, touch bases with James Brown, and delve into the world of comic book character Lois Lane.
Ashley Jones in Reparations and Other Matters of Importance - Badass Black Girl Special Feature
LOCKDOWN & PROTESTS
This episode of Badass Black Girl is featuring two badass guests, Ashley M. Jones and Fabienne Josaphat, in conversation with MJ Fievre. Join us for a far-ranging discussion about the current situation in the United States between pandemics and protests, and for a talk on the emotional labor of being a Black woman in a society built on systemic racism, on self-care, nurturing Black joy, mental health, the global divide between Black people, and much more, including a look to the near future and remembrances of the past.
![Badass Black Girl [the Vlog] - Ep.2 S2 - "Lockdown & Protests" with Ashley Jones & Fabienne Josaphat](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Iy7c0ixMGLE/maxresdefault.jpg)
Badass Black Girl [the Vlog] - Ep.2 S2 - "Lockdown & Protests" with Ashley Jones & Fabienne Josaphat
Ashley M. Jones received an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University (FIU), where she was a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellow. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including CNN, the Academy of American Poets, 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.
She received a 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a 2015 B-Metro Magazine Fusion Award. Her debut poetry collection, Magic City Gospel, was published by Hub City Press in January 2017, and it 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. She won the 2018 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize from Backbone Press, and she is the 2019 winner of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award from St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where she is founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, 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.
