I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet and editor. She holds fellowships from Hedgebrook Callaloo, The Watering Hole, Brooklyn Poets, and Bread Loaf where she was the 2023 Rona Jaffe Scholar in poetry. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, LA Review of Books, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Since 2019, she has served as an editor at 20:35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, the longest running anthology for living African poets. Currently, I.S. is a senior editor for Poetry Northwest where she runs her column, "The Legacy Suite", a three-part interview documenting the journey of writers publishing their debut poetry collections. Her chapbook Spells of My Name, selected for their Emerging Poets Series, was published with Newfound in 2021. She is the 2024-2025 Artist-In-Resident at Northwestern University with the Black Arts Consortium.

Nicole Sealey is the author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, an excerpt from which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, Ordinary Beast, finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her honors include a 2023-2024 Cullman Center Fellowship from the New York Public Library, a Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has appeared in various journals including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Poetry London. She teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University.

Praise for Bloodmercy

"Jones is a poet I look up to for several reasons, a primary one being her attentiveness towards and fearless relationship with language. Between the ancestral and the modern, between angel song and curses, Bloodmercy challenges the reader to question the boundaries of language and what it allows us to do."-Shlagha Borah, Rumpus

"I.S. Jones is an important new voice in poetry."--Charles Rammelkamp, Compulsive Reader

"An original and robust new take on Cain and Abel."--Rebecca Morgan Frank, Lit Hub

"Reinterpreting Cain and Abel as sisters, the poems in this very impressive debut have the fearsome, violent, musical force of myth. . . . As a series they form a sustained engagement with the idea of power--power we succumb to and power we claim--and triangulate a kind of hybrid space both real and allegorical, in a time both present and eternal-past."--Elisa Gabbert, New York Times, "Best Poetry of 2025"

Praise for Bloodmercy

"Jones is a poet I look up to for several reasons, a primary one being her attentiveness towards and fearless relationship with language. Between the ancestral and the modern, between angel song and curses, Bloodmercy challenges the reader to question the boundaries of language and what it allows us to do."--Shlagha Borah, Rumpus

"I.S. Jones is an important new voice in poetry."--Charles Rammelkamp, Compulsive Reader

"An original and robust new take on Cain and Abel."--Rebecca Morgan Frank, Lit Hub

"Reinterpreting Cain and Abel as sisters, the poems in this very impressive debut have the fearsome, violent, musical force of myth. . . . As a series they form a sustained engagement with the idea of power--power we succumb to and power we claim--and triangulate a kind of hybrid space both real and allegorical, in a time both present and eternal-past."--Elisa Gabbert, New York Times, "Best Poetry of 2025"

Publisher: American Poetry Review

Pub date: 2025-09-09

Length: 88 pages