Word Thursdays: Jacqueline Trimble & Ashley Jones

Word Thursdays Online featuring Ashley Jones & Jacqueline Trimble will broadcast live on Thursday, August 8 at 7 PM EST.

To attend the event, please click this link just before 7 PM EST:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81577446746

Or visit Bright Hill’s Facebook page at 7 PM EST to view the live stream. RSVP to the event on Facebook here.

Suggested donation is $3, and free to students.

Donations to Bright Hill are gratefully accepted via Paypal, or by check made out to Bright Hill Press Inc, and mailed to: 94 Church Street, Treadwell, NY 13846, or by credit card by personal appointment by emailing info@brighthillpress.org.

Virtual “donation jar:”
https://paypal.me/brighthillpress

FEATURED WRITERS

Jacqueline Allen Trimble

Jacqueline Allen Trimble lives and writes in Montgomery, Alabama. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow (Poetry), a Cave Canem Fellow, and an Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow (2017, 2023). In addition to her academic work, her poetry has appeared in various journals including Poetry Magazine, The Louisville Review, The Offing, The Rumpus, Salvation South, and Poet Lore and has also been featured by the Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day twice, Poetry Daily, Poem-a Day, and Duke University’s Hart Leadership Program Poem of the Week. Her work is included in the following anthologies: This is The Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (Little Brown, 2024), a collection of the best of contemporary African American poetry; All Night, All Day: Life, Death and Angels, (Madville Publishing, 2023), a collection of poems and essays about angels, The Beautiful: Poet’s Reimagine a Nation (Galaula Arts), a collection of visual poems from each U.S. state and a traveling exhibit, The Night’s Magician (Negative Capability Press), a collection of eighty poems by contemporary writers on the moon, and essays on writing appear in “A Woman Explains How Learning Poetry is Poetry and Not Magic Made Her a Poet,” Southern Writers on Writing (University Press of Mississippi), essays from twenty-six contemporary Southern writers, and Old Enough, (UGA Press, Forthcoming 2024) a collection of essays on aging and creativity by women artists. She wrote five episodes for the first season of Die Testament a South African soap opera that streamed on Netwerk24 in fall of 2019 and eight episodes for the second season, Die Testament 2, which aired in spring 2022. Published by NewSouth Books, American Happiness, her debut poetry collection won the 2016 Balcones Poetry Prize. The ironically titled book examines America’s refusal to grapple with hard truths, preferring instead the pretense that everyone and everything is just fine. Of the work Honorée Jeffers wrote, “I longed for her kind of poetry, these cut-to-the-flesh poems, this verse that sings the old time religion of difficult truths with new courage and utter sister-beauty.” How to Survive the Apocalypse, her second poetry collection, was published by NewSouth Books, an imprint of UGA Press, in August 2022 and was listed as one of the top ten best poetry books of 2022 by New York Public Library. Randall Horton writes about the book, “Not since Carolyn Rogers have we heard a voice this bold buttressed by poetic craft. It’s all here—the energy and excitement of Black idiom reimagined as contemporary art, the beautiful defiance of a balled fist disguised as love.” Trimble earned the B.A. from Huntingdon College and the M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Alabama. She is Professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University.

Ashley M. Jones

Ashley M. Jones is the Poet Laureate of Alabama. S Jones is the author of three award-winning poetry collections, most recently Reparations Now! She is the co-editor of WHAT THINGS COST: An Anthology for the People. Her work has been featured by 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, and she teaches in the Low Residency MFA Program at Converse University.