Sylvia Jones

Lecturer / Adjunct ProfessorCreative Writing

Sylvia Jones is an adjunct professor at Goucher College, she also works for George Washington University, as a lecturer in creative writing. She works as an associate editor for Black Lawrence Press and intermittently reads for the journal, Ploughshares. She is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Television Fathers (Meekling Press, 2024). She has received fellowships and awards from the Peaked Hill Trust; Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts; Topical Cream; Jack Straw Cultural Center; The Emerging Artist Initiative; OUTWrite DC; Poets at the End of The World Collective; Literary Cleveland; The Cleveland Museum of Art; Bucknell University, where she was a 2021-22 Stadler Fellow. In the summer she serves as a poetry instructor with Goucher’s Prison Education Program and with the Young Writer’s Camp Program. She earned her M.F.A. from American University in Washington D.C. and lives in Baltimore, MD.

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Research, Scholarship, Creative Work in Progress

"Television Fathers" Meekling Press (Fall 2024)

Television Fathers is a debut collection that vacilliates between hero-worship, class inequality, geography, luck, fate, all the while speculating about the significance of names, repetition, deterioration, and loss.

Publications

R&R Journal (December 2023)

"Affirmative Action"
"Getting priced out of the zeitgeist"
"Good propaganda involves real people"

Smartish Pace (August 2023)

“Bob Kaufman like Tendencies"
"Generational Conflict"

Sprung Formal (May 2023)

"Mouse Wars"
"Another Violent Inflection Point"
"Because the idea of having kids..."

Mountaineer Books, Campfire Stories: Vol. II (April 2023)

"Signs of wildlife"

Cortland Review (October 2022)

"Off the Backwoods' Cherry"
"Don Draper Demonstrates in his Clogs"

Poet Lore (Winter 2022)

"On the tiniest of budgets"

The Hopkins Review (Spring 2022)

"First black cop bop"
"Perpetual resin"

Shenandoah (Winter 2021)

"Man with shotgun and alien”
"Tender-headed” 

Exhibits or Performances

Speaker — Waverly Book Festival (2023)

Speaker — Maryland State Arts Council Triennial Exhibition

Speaker — Represent: Writing Inspired by Black Art, Cleveland Museum of Art (2022)

External Awards, Honors, Grants

Nominee, 2023 Annual Pushcart Prize

Finalist, 2023 Baker Artist Award, Literary Arts

Conference Papers & Panel Participation

Reader/Reviewer — Verge Literary Magazine, Goucher College, Towson, MD (2023 - ongoing)

Panelist — Howard County Poetry & Literature Society/Poet Laureate Program, (Jan - Apr 2022)

Panelist — Creative Forces Community Engagement Grant Program , Kansas City, MO (Feb - March 2022)

Panelist — "Virtual Open House” Different Strokes/Different Folks, LGBTQ Center New York, (2022)

Panelist — Center for Art, Design & Visual Culture: “When Public Art is More than Sculpture” (Feb 2023)