KIMA JONES
As a Black poet and memoirist, New York native Kima Jones dedicated the first five years of her West Coast career to nurturing the careers of other writers of color. “Telling the stories of Black and Brown writers beyond New York, Chicago and the South,” says Jones, who has been published in Poets and Writers, NPR and McSweeney’s. “That was the goal.” Today, her publicity company, Jack Jones Literary Arts, which she founded in 2015 after moving to downtown Los Angeles, represents some of the most important names in poetry and fiction, from Tyehimba Jess, the 2017 winner of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, to Rion Amilcar Scott, winner of the 2017 PEN America Robert W. Bingham prize for debut fiction.
Now Jones, 38, is stepping away from Jack Jones to focus on her own work, a memoir called “Butch,” about her life growing up in a hard-working family committed to staying together (Jones spent six years of her childhood in foster care). It will be published by Knopf in 2023.
Like everything she writes – essays, text messages – she considers it a work of poetry and says the pandemic has allowed her the time to think about the ways that she has survived in her life and that everyone is surviving now. Poetry has a role in that, too.
“Poetry is so revolutionary,” Jones says. “It is complete and portable and moves in ways that other language doesn’t move.”