Poet
Whittney Jones is the author of "The Old Works" (The Heartland Review Press, 2019), a poetry chapbook. Her poems have been published in Blackbird, Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, Third Coast, Zone 3, and RHINO, among others. She won the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award in the Illinois Emerging Writers Competition where she placed 1st in 2014 and 2nd in 2016. Jones was selected by Illinois Poet Laureate, Angela Jackson to be an ambassador of poetry in 2020. She also helms the poetry section of ARTSCO, a nonprofit organization in southern Illinois created to promote the arts in her community and surrounding counties.
Awards
Poetry Ambassador for Illinois – Selected by State Poet Laureate Angela Jackson 2020-2024
RHINO 2023, Founders' Prize Runner-Up,International PPB/DICER1 Registry Quality of Life Survey
Longlist – 2021 Palette Poetry Emerging Poet Prize
Finalist – 2019 International Literary Awards Rita Dove Poetry Prize, “Pleuropulmonary Blastoma”
Finalist – 2017 International Literary Awards Rita Dove Poetry Prize, "Will Scarlet Mine"
2nd Place - Illinois Emerging Writers Competition 2016, “The Price of Coal”
1st Place – Illinois Emerging Writers Competition 2014, “The Dollar Value of Fingers”
The Old Works
In The Old Works, Whittney Jones takes us to rural Illinois on the Ohio River, where lives are shaped by the coal mining industry, where the grit "stains everything," where "you consider the weight of money over black lung," where families test fate daily for a better life. Here, Jones questions the sacrifices made to sustain a family, where hardship only magnifies the tenderness between lovers, between parent and child. When I finished this book, I turned to the beginning and read these moving and necessary poems all over again.
--Blas Falconer, author of Forgive the Body This Failure
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Mary Oliver