The American Nigerian poet and music journalist Itiola Jones is a recipient of the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing’s Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellowship. The programme considers writers who have published only one full-length collection of creative writing.
Jones is an editor at the 20.35 Africa poetry collective. She is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the recipient of the inaugural 2019-2020 Kemper K. Knapp University Fellowship. A Book Editor with Indolent Books and Editor at Voicemail Poems, she founded and facilitates The Singing Bullet, a month-long poetry workshop every April. She splits her time between Southern California and New York.
“I’m extremely grateful to Sean Hill for selecting me as one of this year’s Hoffman-Halls Emerging Arts Fellowship recipient,” Jones said in a comment to Open Country Mag. “The HEAF fellowship, which awards its recipients a generous stipend plus benefits, will afford me more time to finish my full-length collection of poems and my various other projects. Art Administration is very immediate work of the heart and I am grateful that I will continue to work as Director of the Watershed Reading Series for Art Lit Lab by giving writers a space to be paid for their work and to build community.”
“When I was awarded the Kemper K. Knapp Fellowship my first year,” she said, “it afforded me time and resources to complete and publish my chapbook. I wish to thank the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing for this incredible opportunity.”
