Ashley M. Jones

Biography

Ashley M. Jones is the author of dark / / thing (Pleiades, 2019) and Magic City Gospel (Hub City, 2017). She has been awarded fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Alabama State Council on the Arts, and she was the winner of the 2018 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and the 2019 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. Her work appears or is forthcoming in CNN, Shenandoah, and Oxford American, among others. She is the codirector of PEN Birmingham, the director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, and she teaches at the Alabama School of Fine Arts.

See Work

POETRY / Fall 2020

Excess

By Ashley M. Jones

Two boys, pink in their manhood, lean over a balcony, full 
of teeth. Below: a brown man, skin tired of holding his bones. 
Work falls in shadows around his feet. 
The Puget Sound is bluer than any dream or sky. The boys loom, pink.

POETRY / Fall 2020

Greatest Nigger Who Ever Lived

By Ashley M. Jones

in the selfie he is currently texting to “Lula Mae,”
the man next to me on flight 4853
to Columbia, dressed in a black turtleneck
and a thick double chain,

POETRY / Fall 2020

Love Note: Surely

By Ashley M. Jones

Surely you stay my certain own, you stay
obtuse. Surely your kisses were little poisons 
gripping tight my lips, my arms, mapping their way
across my unsure body. Surely, this fission