Ashley Jones

Ashley M. Jones is the Poet Laureate of Alabama (2022-2026). She is the first person of color and youngest person in Alabama’s history to hold this position, which was created in 1930). Jones is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Lullaby for the Grieving. She is the co-editor of WHAT THINGS COST: An Anthology for the People, and she has earned fellowships and awards from many organizations, including the Academy of American Poets, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Alabama State Council on the Arts. Her poems are published in many journals and publications including POETRY, Academy of American Poets, and The Oxford American, and her work has been featured by outlets including PBS, CNN, The BBC, Good Morning America, ABC News, and the New York Times. Jones is the Associate Director of the University Honors Program at UAB, the executive director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, and she is a PhD student in English at Old Dominion University.

Artist Statement

When I first recited a poem about Harriet Tubman to my second grade class, I felt a power, a freedom, and an ancestral connection I never had felt before. Even then, in my seven-year-old body, I recognized something transforming inside me—what used to be a timid voice became more steady, what used to be doubt in the face of racism (yes, at seven) became confidence in the brilliant ancestry to which I belonged, and what used to be a big question mark about where I belonged became a clear call to the page. I’ve been writing poetry since then, and what has remained true is that I find my clearest voice, my closest ancestral connection, and my truest sense of self when I’m reading, writing, and performing poetry. I am concerned about telling the truth about my place in America, about Black history, and about what it feels like to experience this planet as a human being. I’m very interested in using the page as an infinite space of creation—I write in traditional poetic form and in unconventional form. I write in free verse and in strange shapes and formats. In my poetry, I want to think about God, Blackness, history, identity, womanhood, and what it means to survive this world. I am seen clearest in my work.