about

"Jacqueline Jones LaMon's poems embody a stillness and grace. They illuminate." —Toi Derricotte


photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

  Jacqueline Jones LaMon is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College, UCLA School of Law, and Indiana University Bloomington where she earned her MFA in Poetry. A graduate fellow and member of the Board of Directors of Cave Canem Foundation, Inc., her first poetry collection, GRAVITY, U.S.A., received the Quercus Review Press Poetry Series Book Award. Her second collection, LAST SEEN, is the recipient of the 2011 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry (University of Wisconsin Press). Her first novel, IN THE ARMS OF ONE WHO LOVES ME, was published by One World/Ballantine Books. Her work has appeared in publications such as CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW, INDIANA REVIEW, MYTHIUM, NINTH LETTER, CALLALOO, the NEW PITTSBURD COURIER, and the INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER. She is Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Adelphi University, where she teaches poetry, literature, and pedagogy.

 


Praises for Jacqueline Jones LaMon


"With her debut, Jacqueline Jones LaMon graces us with a collection both introspective and out of body, her poems taking on the weight of the everyday world, and the extraordinary within it. GRAVITY, U.S.A. is not just a book filled with subtle, sorrowful, and ultimately brazen power, but a place where you'll want to visit, and stay." —Kevin Young


"Jacqueline Jones LaMon has a wonderful ability to hear what the rest of us don’t, and the great gift of being able to dramatize the unheard and the half-spoken." —Maura Stanton


"Wherever you are when you read GRAVITY, U.S.A., mercy, depends on wherever you are when you need GRAVITY, U.S.A. Each poem flirts with the skin of a new born drama and dream. And then, sometimes, inside the hush hush between prose and song, where most poems stay poems, the vernacular (and its logic) strikes again and every thinker and feeler going to the territory is lifted high, high, er." —Thomas Sayers Ellis

"LaMon's poems are packed with sharp detail, street parlance and jazzy riffs. The stuff of real lives. Greetings to a bright new voice." —Dorianne Laux


"Amid the barriers we face in trying to reach each other—the weight of history, the “hushed mumbling” and “drone of life’s most heavy traffic”—these poems are forged from an acute knowledge of the “off –note” that still signals “the fugue of intention.” In lively, resonant language, they show again and again the necessary reaching toward song that connects us." —Natasha Trethewey


"Ms. J. LaMon uses her gorgeous poetic "vocabulary," to translate keen observations and exquisite moments into poems so lyrically delicious you want to lick them with your eyes." —Wanda Coleman