FIU MFA Spotlight: Ashley M. Jones

Since graduating from the FIU MFA program in May 2015, poet Ashley M. Jones has received a 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award, has had her first poetry collection accepted, and has just been named co-editor of PANK Magazine.

The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award is given annually to six women writers who demonstrate excellence and promise in the early stages of their careers.The awards of $30,000 were presented to the six recipients on September 17th in New York City.  You can hear Jones and the other awardees  reading from their work on the foundation website.

Jones' poetry collection Magic City Gospel, which was her MFA thesis, will be published in Fall 2016 by Hub City Books. Currently a faculty member teaching creative writing at Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham, AL, Jones recently received a Birmingham Metro Fusion Award.

In early December, PANK Magazine's new publisher John Gosslee announced the latest stage in the life of the magazine, originally founded by M. Bartley Siegel and Roxane Gay in 2006 with the goal of publishing “emerging and innovative poetry and prose, publishing the brightest and most promising writers for the most adventurous readers.” "I want us, as artists, to create wild art with purpose," Jones says in a piece just published in which Jones and fellow editor Chris Campioni discuss PANK's vision and their personal aesthetics.

Jones was a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellow while in FIU's graduate program. She served as Official Poet for the City of Sunrise, FL, and her work was recognized in the 2014 Poets and Writers Maureen Egen Writer's Exchange contest and the 2015 Academy of American Poets competition at FIU. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Night Owl, The Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, pluck!, Valley Voices: New York School Edition, Fjords Review: Black American Edition, PMSPoemMemoirStory, Kinfolks Quarterly, Tough Times in American Anthology, and Lucid Moose Press's Like a Girl. Learn  more about Ashley M. Jones at her website.

 

Nina Romano's First Novel, The Secret Language of Women

FIU MFA alumna Nina Romano's The Secret Language of Women, an historical novel set against the background of the Boxer Rebellion, has recently been published by Turner Publishing. The first of the Wayfarer Trilogy, the novel will be followed by Lemon Blossoms, set in mob-era Sicily, and In America, which moves to in Brooklyn during the Great Depression.

Among Romano's earlier works are the poetry chapbooks Prayer in a Summer of Grace and Time's Mirrored Illusion (both, Flutter Press) and Faraway Confections, a full-length collection from Aldrich Press. You can read more about these and other projects at Romano's website. She will be reading from and discussing her book at Murder on the Beach bookstore in Delray Beach along with author D.J. Niko on Nov. 13 at 7 PM, at Miami Book Fair International's Festival of Authors, Sat. Nov. 21st at 2 PM,  and at Books & Books in Coral Gables on December 11th at 6 PM.

Elisa Albo's Each Day More Published

Main Street Rag Press has published Each Day More, a collection of elegies by MFA alumna Elisa Albo. The Potomac Review writes, "The poems in Each Day More are somber, but they are wise . . . The spare, evocative lines also provide their own sense of solace by the sheer artfulness and gentle reflection with which they are written."

Albo's work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Alimentum, Bomb Magazine, Crab Orchard Review, MiPoesias, and Tigertail: a South Florida Annual. Her chapbook Coming to America, originally published by March Street Press and available as an ebook, will soon be reissued by Main Street Rag Press. Born in Havana and raised in Central Florida, Albo teaches English and ESL at Broward College.

Anthony Gagliano's The Emperor's Club Published

MFA alumnus Anthony Gagliano's noir thesis novel, Straits of Fortune, was published by Harper Collins to critical acclaim.  But while he was working on the follow-up, continuing the adventures of Jack Vaughan, Gagliano suffered a stroke and died at 53, leaving The Emperor's Club incomplete.  His professors at FIU, Dan Wakefield and Les Standiford, took on the task of finishing the book, which has now been published by MidTown Publishing.

The result, says Pamela Akins in The Florida Book Review, is "an action-packed crime tale, preserving Gagliano's sharp, world-weary voice."  How Standiford and Wakefield's approached turning the layered drafts of the unfinished book into the published one is recounted in this article from FIU news.