We are excited to offer an incredible opportunity for students to participate in a mini-version of City as Text®.

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Facilitated By:

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Ashley Jones

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Ashley M. Jones was the Poet Laureate of Alabama (January 2022-January 2026). She was 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 author of the essay collection What the Mirror Said: The Necessity of Black Women in Poetry, and she is the co-editor of What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People. Jones has

earned fellowships and awards from many organizations, including the SouthArts, 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, The Atlantic, The

Nation, 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 a PhD student in English at Old Dominion

University.

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Jacqueline Allen Trimble

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Jacqueline Allen Trimble lives and works in Montgomery where she is  a professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University.  She is a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow (Poetry), a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, and an Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow (2017, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in various journals including Poetry Magazine, The Louisville Review, The Offing, The Rumpus, Salvation South, and Poet Lore, has been featured by the Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day twice, Poetry Daily, and Poem-a Day, and appears in the anthologies This is The Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (Little Brown, 2024), All Night, All Day: Life, Death and Angels, (Madville Publishing), The Beautiful: Poet’s Reimagine a Nation (Galaula Arts), and The Night’s Magician (Negative Capability Press). Published by NewSouth Books, American Happiness, her debut poetry collection won the 2016 Balcones Poetry Prize. How to Survive the Apocalypse, her second poetry collection, was listed as one of the top ten

best poetry books of 2022 by New York Public Library.​

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