Electric Literature is excited to welcome Kima Jones, founder of Jack Jones Literary Arts, to its board of directors.
Jones founded Jack Jones Literary Arts in 2015 to support the work of writers of color through publicity services, a speakers bureau, and writing workshops. In addition to her work as a publicist and advocate, Jones is a poet and writer. She has received fellowships from PEN America West Emerging Voices, Kimbilio Fiction, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony, and her work has been published in GQ, Guernica, Poets and Writers, NPR, and McSWeeney’s, and was included in New York Times best-selling anthology The Fire this Time, edited by Jesmyn Ward. She was the recipient of the 2019 Energizer Award for Exceptional Acts of Literary Citizenship by CLMP.
Jones is also an active supporter of the literary community at large, and serves on advisory boards for the Rumpus, the Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship, the Black Mountain Institute and its flagship magazine, The Believer, and the Loft’s literary festival, Wordplay.
Jones brings her passion for community-building to Electric Literature. “As a representative of West Coast publishing interests, I’m very excited to help Halimah and her team expand its programming and reach outside of New York and the East Coast,” said Jones, who will be Electric Literature’s second board member outside New York City and its first on the West Coast.
“EL’s mission is to make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive,” said EL’s executive director, Halimah Marcus. “That means remembering that the literary world doesn’t start and end in New York—or in the U.S. We have contributors from all around the country and the world, and we plan to keep expanding our focus both nationally and globally.”
Kima Jones joins newly appointed board members Meredith Talusan and Nicole Cliffe, as well as long-time board members Sean McDonald (Executive Editor and Vice President, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux), Danielle McConnell (Publisher, BookForum), Sara Nelson (Executive Editor and Vice President, Harper Collins), Pulitzer Prize–winning author Michael Cunningham, and board chair Andy Hunter (Publisher, Catapult and Lit Hub).
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