Lois P. Jones won the 2023 Alpine Fellowship which this year takes place in Fjällnäs, Sweden. Some awards include the Bristol Poetry Prize, the Lascaux Poetry Prize for a single poem, the Tiferet Poetry Prize and winning finalist for the Terrain Poetry contest judged by Jane Hirshfield. She was a finalist in 2023 for the annual Mslexia Poetry Competition judged by Helen Mort and in 2022 for both the Best Spiritual Literature Award in Poetry from Orison Books and the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Other honors include a Highly Commended and publication in the 2021 Bridport Poetry Prize Anthology In collaboration with filmmaker Jutta Pryor and sound designer Peter Verwimp, her poem La Scapigliata won the 2022 Lyra Bristol Poetry Film Competition.
Jones’ work appears or is forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets – Poem A Day, Poetry Wales, Mslexia, Plume, Guernica Editions, Vallentine Mitchell of London; Verse Daily, Tupelo Quarterly, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Narrative and others. Her first collection, “Night Ladder” was published by Glass Lyre Press in 2017 and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award and the Lascaux Poetry Prize for a poetry collection. She is a screening judge for Claremont University’s Kingsley-Tufts Awards. Since 2007 Jones has hosted KPFK’s Poets Café, co-produced the Moonday Poetry Series and acted as poetry editor for Pushcart and Utne prize-winning Kyoto Journal.
Jones participated in the 2022 Cheltenham Poetry Festival, the 2018 Houston Poetry Fest, the Bristol, England Poetry Festival, the Eyewear Publishing launch at Goodenough College, London, and attended conferences in San Miguel de Allende Mexico from 2005 to 2010 as well as Languedoc Rousseau, France with Pascale Petit.
Her literary works have been translated to Korean for Miju Poetry and Poetics by the Korean Poets Society of America (2019) as well as Chinese for Mirrors and Windows published by Guernica Editions. Other work has been included in Arabic for the Publisher Weekly, Arabic Edition “Al-Nasher Al-Usboei” magazine in 2015.
Break On Through (To the Other Side) — An Interview with Poets Café’s Lois P. Jones
Cover image – The West Hollywood Gateway Billboard, National Poetry Month. Photograph by Elena Secota.
