Alabama Poet Laureate Ashley M. Jones will be visiting JSU this week as part of the Write, Southerners! Reading Series. On Wednesday, March 9, Jones will be reading from a selection of her own poetry before a Q&A session between herself and the audience in the Merrill Hall Auditorium from 4:30-6:00 PM.

The next day, Jones will serve as the keynote speaker at the Women’s History Month Keynote Address and Awards Ceremony. The ceremony will take place in the Leone Cole Auditorium from 5-8PM on Thursday, March 10.

Jones has earned numerous accolades throughout her career, her most recent being named the Poet Laureate of the state of Alabama 2022-2026. Before then, Jones was 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 also a finalist for the Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship in 2020, and her collection, REPARATIONS NOW! was on the longlist for the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry.

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. Jones is also a member of the Core Faculty at the Converse University Low Residency MFA Program. She recently served as a guest editor for Poetry Magazine.”

More about Jones can be read on the event listing on the CAH event calendar.