Columbia Museum of Art to host poetry summit with nationally acclaimed poets Nickole Brown, Jessica Jacobs, and Ashley M. Jones

Half-day event celebrates poetry and visual art

CMA Writer-in-Residence Ray McManus hosts the museum’s Poetry Summit, a half-day event celebrating poetry and visual art on Sunday, November 3, from noon to 5:00 p.m. Participants work closely with award-winning and nationally acclaimed poets Nickole Brown, Jessica Jacobs, and Ashley M. Jones, who each lead a workshop that broadens the relationships writers can have with visual art. A free public reading, book signing, and reception follows on Boyd Plaza at 4:00 p.m.

Nickole Brown, Jessica Jacobs, and Ashley M. Jones.

Designed for writers at any stage of their career or interest, these workshops provide prompts for generating ideas as well as strategies on how to create effective poems that expand (and even challenge) the conversations and reactions writers and patrons have when encountering art. Brown, Jacobs, and Jones also read from their award-winning work.

“No matter how much experience one may have with poetry and writing about art, this summit is a fun way to get helpful insights and strategies for expanding the conversation poets have and can have with artwork,” says McManus. “It’s a wonderful opportunity for writers in and around Columbia to get a chance to work with and hear from three amazing poets who have a national reputation for being stellar in their craft and who also happen to use art as a conduit for much of their writing.”

Brown is the author of Sister, first published in 2007 with a new edition reissued by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2018. Her second book, Fanny Says, came out from BOA Editions and won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. The audiobook of that collection became available in 2017. She is the editor for the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program and the Great Smokies Writing Program at the University of North Carolina-Asheville. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville, NC, where she periodically volunteers at three different animal sanctuaries. Currently, Brown is at work on a bestiary of sorts about these animals, but it won’t consist of the kind of pastorals that always made her (and most of the working-class folks she knows) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it — these poems speak in a queer, Southern-trash-talking kind of way about nature: beautiful, damaged, dangerous, and in desperate need of saving. A chapbook of these poems called To Those Who Were Our First Gods recently won the 2018 Rattle Chapbook Prize, and another sequence called The Donkey Elegies will be published as a chapbook by Sibling Rivalry Press in early 2020.

Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going, published by Four Way Books in March 2019. Her debut collection, Pelvis with Distance, a biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keeffe, won the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. She received her Bachelor of Arts at Smith College and her Master of Fine Arts in poetry at Purdue University. Her poetry, essays, and fiction have appeared in publications including Orion, New England Review, Guernica, and The Missouri Review. An avid long-distance runner, Jacobs has worked as a rock climbing instructor, bartender, and professor — teaching for Hendrix College, University of North Carolina-Wilmington’s MFA program, and writing workshops in Greece, among other programs — and now serves as the chapbook editor for Beloit Poetry Journal. She lives in Asheville, NC, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown.

Jones is a poet, organizer, and educator from Birmingham, Alabama. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from Florida International University and is the author of Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press, 2017) and dark / / thing (Pleiades Press, 2019). Her poetry has earned local and national awards, including the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, the silver medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, a Literature Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. Her poems and essays appear in or are forthcoming at CNN, The Oxford American, Origins Journal, The Quarry by Split This Rock, Obsidian, and many others. Jones teaches at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and the University of Alabama at Birmingham and is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival in Birmingham.

$20 / $10 members / $5 for students with ID. Registration required for workshops and includes admission to the galleries, including Van Gogh and His Inspirations. The public reading, book signing, and reception are free.

This project is supported by a grant from the Knight Foundation Fund and by a Connected Communities grant at Central Carolina Community Foundation with additional support from the Poetry Society of South Carolina.

For more information, visit columbiamuseum.org.