I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet, essayist and former music journalist. She is a Graduate Fellow with The Watering Hole and holds fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT Writer's Retreat, and Brooklyn Poets. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, The Offing, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in Poetry at UW—Madison where she was the inaugural 2019—2020 Kemper K. Knapp University Fellowship and is the 2021-2022 Hoffman Hall Emerging Artist Fellowship recipient. She is the Director of the Watershed Reading Series with Art + Literature Laboratory. Her chapbook Spells of My Name (2021) is out with Newfound.

Other poems on the web by I.S. Jones:
Two poems
Two poems
Two poems
"Self-Portrait as Etioly"
"Between Grace and Mercy"

I.S. Jones's Website.

I.S. Jones on Twitter.

About Spells of My Name:

"'There are so many names I've been called / but none belong to me,' I.S. Jones writes. In Spells of My Name, I.S. Jones charts a course to translate the untranslatable—which is to say, to translate oneself. One's name, one's being, one's gods, one's desires. These poems press forward in exploring, with refined skill. Jones holds a magnifying glass up to every part of themselves, attempting to name, then rename, then name again. In so doing, we're left with poems complicated and vast, that leave the reader excited for more. This is a poet to watch, a poet to admire, a poet whose truths bring us evermore truth and an ever expanding closeness to self."
—Fatimah Asghar

"Imbuing the heaviness of heritage with rhythms of the hunt, I.S. Jones, in this volume, moves us into 'Fields of selves.' Through desire and all the animal impulses, through trust and transatlantic traumas, the lyric speakers find themselves on borders of identity, of history and myth, reality and dream, with voices always perched on the edge of soft and sharp. This is a poet for whom language is that spiritual project of self-recognition as 'fragmented pieces of the Singular.' Spells of My Name lives in such assurance, and at the same time—because recognition involves naming, and indeed, being named by the world—in the deep, rich shadows of doubt."
—Logan February