Ashley M. Jones
“Birmingham means my mom and my dad and my sisters and my brother. It means a place to learn and to love. It means injustice and a fight for justice. It means Dynamite Hill and children killed. It means jubilee and Thunder on the Mountain. Birmingham is every magic—including the tragic—of home.”
Ashley M. Jones is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival. She is the author of Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press) and dark / / thing (Pleiades Press), and her work has appeared or is forthcoming at CNN, The Oxford American, The Academy of American Poets, Shenandoah, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, and other journals, anthologies, and publications. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Independent Publishers Book Awards, and the Alabama Library Association. Jones won the 2018 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and the 2019 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. She teaches at the Alabama School of Fine Arts.