Sylvia Jones
Sylvia Jones is a writer, editor, and prison abolitionist. At the moment, she serves as a 2021-22 Stadler Fellow. She works as an associate editor for West Branch and as a poetry editor for Black Lawrence Press. She also intermittently reads for Ploughshares. Her writing appears in DIAGRAM, Poet Lore, the Hopkins Review, the Santa Clara Review, Shenandoah, Revolute, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from American University in Washington D.C. and has received support from the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts; PEN America; Topical Cream; Poets at the End of the World; Literary Cleveland; The Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, and Transgender Community Center of New York; and the Maryland State Arts Council. She lives in Baltimore with her partner Agata and their buff tabby, Theo.
Reading List
Guest Editor’s Note
What is social duty to an identity? The poems I’ve selected for this issue strive to respond to this question and others. They are an eloquent argument against oversimplifying what it means to represent a community and shed light on poets’ responsibilities to their communities. With rigorous pizzazz and a few sprinkles of discretion, these […]
Tender-Headed
a cento between youth and whatever’s up next the river is moving Nobody sees me running toward the sun her hands are cold. What time is it? sweet clot of wakefulness, what is mercy? A pony on the balcony! a man who swam in his house three days with […]
Man with Shotgun and Alien
after Noah Davis’s Man with Shotgun and Alien, oil and acrylic on canvas selling two-minute clocks, high above an out of focus past, invisible from the street, my first decapitation was a sweetheart in the backseat hereafter of a good pollen-covered car glass-arched, under the whirring ceiling fan, pounding mornings in the floor with my […]