UUCB Service Speaker:

Ashley M. Jones is the Poet Laureate of the State of Alabama (2022-2026). She holds an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University, and she is the author of Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press 2017), dark / / thing (Pleiades Press 2019), and REPARATIONS NOW! (Hub City Press 2021). Her poetry has earned several awards, including the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, a Literature Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. She was 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. Her poems and essays appear in or are forthcoming at CNN, POETRY, The Oxford American, Origins Journal, The Quarry by Split This Rock, Obsidian, and many others. She co-directs PEN Birmingham, and she is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival. She teaches in the Creative Writing Department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts, and she is part of the Core Faculty of the Converse University Low Residency MFA Program. She recently served as a guest editor for Poetry Magazine.

UUCB Service Description:

“Growing up as a Black woman in Birmingham, Alabama, I have never doubted the idea that struggle and unfairness exists for my people and many others on planet earth. But it did take time to understand that some of the people who actively participate in the oppression of marginalized people don’t always realize that they have or are perpetuating bias. They argue that they’re “good,” so how could they ever participate in something “bad” like oppression. How can we step away from this idea of our own goodness and move into a more empathetic mode of thinking–it’s vital that we begin practicing self-searching and take away the false dichotomy of personal goodness and racial bias. A person can be good and hold bias simultaneously. Self searching can look a lot like meditation and prayer, and it can begin with a look through our shared history. I will read poems which demonstrate my own self-search and my commitment to my history, my spirituality, and my desire for change.