ABOUT.

Michal ‘MJ’ Jones is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet, parent, and editor living in Oakland, CA. Their poems have appeared in Anomaly, Kissing Dynamite, Obsidian, Split This Rock: The Quarry, TriQuarterly Review, & elsewhere. MJ also serves as the Editor-In-Chief of Foglifter Journal & Press, an award-winning literary journal publishing radical work by LGBTQIA2-S writers. They are the author of two collections of poetry, HOOD VACATIONS  from Black Lawrence Press, and  SOFT ARMOR from Nomadic Press, both published in 2023.

Often addressing the troubling and haunting aspects of life, violence, and identity, MJ’s poetry blends lyrical, documentary, and confessional modes. They have been awarded fellowships from Lambda Literary, Hurston/Wright Foundation, VONA/Voices, & Kearny Street Workshop. They received their MFA in Creative Writing – Poetry from Mills College, where they received the distinguished Community Engagement Fellowship. They founded & facilitated Litany!, a workshop for a cohort of Black queer & trans poets. An engaged literary citizen, they have repeatedly served on individual artist review panels for the cities of Berkeley and San Francisco, and as both assistant and final judge of the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest for Winning Writers. Their personal and political essays have been featured in Everyday Feminism, Black Girl Dangerous, The Body Is Not An Apology, and elsewhere

They are currently busy raising their young son, Glory – their greatest muse – and completing their second full length poetry collection.