I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet, editor, essayist, and former music journalist. She is a Graduate Fellow with The Watering Hole and holds fellowships from Hedgebrook Callaloo, BOAAT Writer’s Retreat, Brooklyn Poets, and Bread Loaf where she was the 2023 Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar in poetry. Jones co-edited The Young African Poets Anthology: The Fire That Is Dreamed Of (Agbowó, 2020) and served as the inaugural nonfiction guest editor for Lolwe. She is an Editor at 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and has freelanced for Complex, Revolt TV, NBC News THINK, and elsewhere.
Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hobart, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, The Offing, Transition, Honey Literary, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in Poetry at UW–Madison where she was the inaugural 2019–2020 Kemper K. Knapp University Fellowship and the 2021-2022 Hoffman Hall Emerging Artist Fellowship recipient. For three years, she served as the Director of the Watershed Reading Series with Art + Literature Laboratory, based in Madison, WI. She was an instructor with Brooklyn Poets and a reader for Poetry Magazine, one of the oldest literary magazines for poetry in the country.
Currently, I.S. is a senior editor for Poetry Northwest where she runs her column The Legacy Suite, a three-part interview documenting the journey of writers publishing their debut poetry collections. Her chapbook Spells of My Name, selected for their Emerging Poets Series, was published with Newfound in 2021. She is the 2024 Artist-In-Resident at Northwestern University with the Black Arts Consortium. Her debut poetry collection, Bloodmercy, chosen by Nicole Sealey, is the 2025 winner APR / Honickman First Book Prize and will be published by The American Poetry Review in 2025.
All photos of the artist are credited to Nicholas Nichols