Ashley M. Jones

Ashley M. Jones is the 2022–2026 poet laureate of Alabama. She is the first person of color and the youngest person to serve in this role in Alabama history. Jones is the author of three poetry collections: REPARATIONS NOW! (Hub City Press, 2021); dark // thing (Pleiades Press, 2019), winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry; and Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press, 2017), winner of the silver medal in poetry in the Independent Publisher Book Awards. Jones is coeditor of WHAT THINGS COST: an anthology for the people (University Press of Kentucky, 2023). Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in journals and anthologies that include the Academy of American Poets, Poetry magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Hand in Hand: Poets Respond to Race,and the Harvard Journal of African American Policy. She has been featured by CNN and the BBC, on Good Morning America, in TheNew York Times, and on ABC News.

Jones served as a guest editor of Poetry in 2021. She earned an MFA 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. She was a finalist in the 2015 Hub City Press New Southern Voices Contest, for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, and in the National Poetry Series. Jones received a 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a 2015 B-Metro Magazine Fusion Award, the 2018 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the 2019 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. She is the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and a 2020 Alabama Author award from the Alabama Library Association. She was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship in 2020 and won a 2022 Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. 

Jones lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where she is associate director of the University Honors Program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, a board member of the Alabama Writers Cooperative and the Alabama Writers’ Forum, codirector of PEN Birmingham, and a core faculty member at the Converse College Low Residency MFA Program.