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Today's poem is "Hearing Sylvia Plath's Voice, circa 1962"
from Vessel

Milkweed Editions

Parneshia Jones has been honored with the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Margaret Walker Short Story Award, and the Aquarius Press Legacy Award. Her work has also been anthologized in She Walks in Beauty: A Woman’s Journey Through Poems, edited by Caroline Kennedy and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, edited by Nikky Finney. A member of the Affrilachian Poets, she serves on the board of Cave Canem and Global Writes. She currently holds positions as Sales and Subsidiary Rights Manager and Poetry Editor at Northwestern University Press. Parneshia Jones lives in Chicago.

Books by Parneshia Jones:

Other poems on the web by Parneshia Jones:
"Congregation"

Parneshia Jones on Twitter.

About Vessel:

"In the tradition of Brooks, Hansberry, Danner, and Walker, Parneshia Jones, dutiful daughter and attentive poet-witness of the Black Chicago Renaissance (1930-1950) imagines and serves memory to us out of a teeming black skillet of life. There is something about a black girl born and raised in Chicago, with a pen behind her ear, that alters the alphabet from finite to infinite. Jones has written a sweet unforgettable first child."
—Nikky Finney

"From bra shopping to haiku to a tribute to Josephine Baker, Parneshia Jones touches all poetic bases in this pioneering book. Whether the scene is somewhere in Mississippi or today's Chicago, she gives us a panorama that only a young inspired black woman could create, not sociologically but poetically. That's as rare these days as visionary poetry itself, but Parneshia Jones does it. She puts the music back into language with an energy that sings off the page."
—Samuel Hazo

"Parneshia Jones is pure literary juke—a record's smoothest rotation, the roll steady of the Gulf. She's cool Chicago nights and the slow crawl of Sunday morning in New Orleans. Parneshia is a world of a woman—Renaissance Conjure Priestess of Earth and the way way beyond. We want her words filling our shelves, our lungs, our hearts. Eyes forward; hands on the wheel—Parneshia Jones knows every curve of the road, the byway, highway—and we're always along for the ride."
—Ellen Hagan



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