Join us for a night of poetry with visiting poet, Ashley M. Jones, and local poet, Donna Aza Weir-Soley!

About the poets:

Ashley M. Jones received an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University.  Her debut poetry collection, Magic City Gospel, was published by Hub City Press in January 2017, and it won the silver medal in poetry in the 2017 Independent Publishers Book Awards. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including the Academy of American Poets, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Steel Toe Review, The Sun, Poets Respond to Race Anthology, and The Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy. She received a 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a 2015 B-Metro Magazine Fusion Award. Her second collection, dark / / thing, won the 2018 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry from Pleiades Press and is forthcoming in February 2019. She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where she is Second Vice President of the Alabama Writers’ Conclave , founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, and a faculty member in the Creative Writing Department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts.

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Originally from Jamaica, Donna Aza Weir-Soley is currently an associate professor of English, African and African diaspora studies, and women's studies at Florida International University. A Mellon and a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, she is the author of a poetry collection, First Rain (2006), and a scholarly text, Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women's Writings (2009), and is the coeditor (with Opal Palmer Adisa) of Caribbean Erotic (2010), an anthology of poetry, fiction, and essays that includes the work of sixty-two writers from the English-speaking, Spanish-speaking, and French-speaking Caribbean.