About this event:

Red Mountain Reading Series presents Ashley M. Jones and Tina Mozelle Braziel

Tuesday, March 10
11:30 a.m. -12:30 p.m.
St. Clair-Pell City Campus – Room 105

Two Birmingham poets make a stop at Jeff State’s St. Clair-Pell City Campus on their “Dark Salt Sisters Tour.” Ashley M. Jones and Tina Mozelle Braziel will read from their most recently published poetry collections and then conduct a workshop for Jefferson State students following the reading. Both events are free, but only the reading at 11:30 am is open to the public. Jefferson State students interested in attending the workshop at 1:00 p.m. should contact English instructor Jacob Melvin for details and reservations, [email protected].

Ashley M. Jones received an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University (FIU), and her poems and essays appear journals and anthologies, including CNN and the Academy of American Poets, among many others. Her debut poetry collection, Magic City Gospel (2017), won the silver medal in poetry in the 2017 Independent Publishers Book Awards. Her second book, dark // thing, won the 2018 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry. Jones currently lives in Birmingham, AL, where she is founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, co-director of PEN Birmingham, and a faculty member in the Creative Writing Department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts. Find more online at ashleymichellejones.wordpress.com/

Tina Mozelle Braziel won the 2017 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for her book Known by Salt (2019). Her chapbook, Rooted by Thirst, came out in 2016. Her individual poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Southern Humanities Review, PMSpoemmemoirstory (where her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize) and other journals. In 2017, she served as an artist-in-residence at Hot Springs National Park. She earned an M.F.A in Poetry from the University of Oregon, an M.A. in Poetry at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and a B.A. in Intercultural Studies at the University of Montevallo. She directs the Ada Long Creative Writing Workshop at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and she and her husband, novelist James Braziel, live and write in a glass cabin that they are building by hand. Find more online at https://tinamozellebraziel.com/about/

Contact reading series director Katie Boyer for more information, [email protected].