Please join us in celebrating the publication of Thresh & Hold by Marlanda Dekine! For this virtual poetry reading and conversation, Dekine will be joined by Ashley M. Jones. This virtual event will take place on our Crowdcast channel. Register at the link below.
Marlanda Dekine (they/she) is a poet and author obsessed with ancestry, memory, and the process of staying within one's own body. Their work leaves spells and incantations for others to follow for themselves. Dekine is the author of the self-published collection and mixtape, i am from a punch & a kiss (2017). Their poems have been published or are forthcoming in the Poetry Out Loud Anthology, POETRY Magazine, Emergence Magazine, Southern Humanities Review, Oxford American, and elsewhere. Dekine is a Tin House Own Path Scholar. They live in South Carolina with their wise dog, Malachi.
Ashley M. Jones is the Poet Laureate of the State of Alabama (2022-2026). She holds an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University, and she is the author of Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press 2017), dark / / thing (Pleiades Press 2019), and REPARATIONS NOW! (Hub City Press 2021). Her poetry has earned several awards, including the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, a Literature Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. She was a finalist for the Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship in 2020, and her collection, REPARATIONS NOW! was on the longlist for the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. Her poems and essays appear in or are forthcoming at CNN, POETRY, The Oxford American, Origins Journal, The Quarry by Split This Rock, Obsidian, and many others. She co-directs PEN Birmingham, and she is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival. She teaches in the Creative Writing Department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts, and she is part of the Core Faculty of the Converse University Low Residency MFA Program. She recently served as a guest editor for Poetry Magazine.
Please note: Our virtual events are recorded and viewable anytime on Women & Children First's Crowdcast Channel. The recordings are later uploaded with closed captioning to our YouTube Channel within a week or two of the event.
Image description: a teal rectangular banner featuring the book cover for Thresh & Hold and a photograph of author Marlanda Dekine. Text reads: Women & Children First welcomes Marlanda Dekine with Ashley M. Jones, Thursday, May 12 at 7 PM CT via Crowdcast.
