Event Location
Avid Bookshop presents poet Ashley Jones for her book Magic City Gospel. The event will be held on Tuesday, March 28th, from 6:30-7:30p.m. at a location to be determined. Stay tuned for updates. The event will be free and open to the public.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Magic City Gospel is a love song to Birmingham, the Magic City of the South. In traditional forms and free verse poems, 2015 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award-winner Ashley M. Jones takes readers on an historical, geographical, cultural, and personal journey through her life and the life of her home state.
From De Soto’s “discovery” of Alabama to George Wallace’s infamous stance in the schoolhouse door, to the murders of black men like Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner in modern America, Jones weaves personal history with the troubled, triumphant, and complicated history of Birmingham, and of Alabama at large. In this assured debut, you’ll find why “gold is laced in Alabama’s teeth.” In the ghosts and the grits, this collection speaks to Jones' generation and beyond: “Let me wash you in Alabama heat / and tell you who you are.”
Magic City Gospel is a book of personal, political, and cultural history, whose red dirt stained pages offer a fresh and unvarnished gaze on Birmingham, Alabama, and America.
ABOUT THE POET:
Ashley M. Jones received an MFA from Florida International University. She was a finalist in Hub City Press’ New Southern Voices Contest, Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award Contest, and the National Poetry Series. Her work has been published by the Academy of American Poets, Pluck!, PMSPoemMemoirStory (where her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2016), Prelude, Kinfolks Quarterly, and other journals. She received a 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award and a 2015 B-Metro Magazine Fusion Award. She is an editor of [PANK] Magazine, and she teaches creative writing at the Alabama School of Fine Arts.
