|
Parneshia Jones
Recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award and the Margaret Walker Short Story Award, Parneshia Jones is published in several anthologies including Warpland: A Journal of Black Literature and Ideas, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South. Parneshia will be featured in forthcoming anthologies 44 on 44: 44 American Writers on the Election of Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States, edited by Lita Hooper, Sonia Sanchez, and Michael Simanga, as well as Poetry Speaks Who I Am, a book/CD compilation of classic and contemporary selections for children ages 12 - 14 discovering the world and the excitement and trials that go with “coming of age;” published by Sourcebooks. Jones has been featured on Chicago Public Radio-Chicago Amplified Series and is a member of the Affrilachian Poets, a collective of Black voices from Appalachia. She has performed her work all over the United States including the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City, the Art Institute in Chicago, and Vanderbilt University.
Jones is
the head of sales and international rights for
Northwestern University Press and
conducts publishing workshops and lectures for
creative writing programs and writers.
She is currently on the board of the Guild
Complex and the advisory board of Uni-Verse
of Poetry: A
United Nations of Poetry, and serves as a
judge for the Cave Canem
Northwestern University Press Poetry
Prize. She holds a M.F.A from
Spalding University and has completed her
first full-length collection of poetry. She is
currently working on a trilogy collection of
persona poems. |
|
Legend of the Buffalo
Poets
For F. X.
Walker and the Affrilachian Poets
There is a rumble in his
roaming.
Part bison, part thunder,
he is a stampede of
words,
raising mountains from
rooted earth.
He leaves a scented trail
of bourbon
and misty coal-tipped
pencils,
blackening the earth with
his footprints.
The Native Americans hold
him
sacred in their stories.
Black Katonka they call
him,
he roams the Kentucky
valleys.
Few have spotted him in
the coal-black
mountains. Sometimes he
grazes alone
and other times he
travels with
a mystical tribe of
Affrilachians.
Anyone that walks these
bluegrass lands
know the stories.
They know when thunder
shakes the hills,
Affrilachians are
writing.
When the sky mists over
Black,
Affrilachians are
speaking with ancestors.
When the earth is warm
and the
soil soaked with poetry,
Affrilachians have left
their mark,
a trail Buffaloed Black.
|