About Whittney

Wife, Mom, Poet, Author, Advocate

Whittney Jones was born and raised in small town southern Illinois, in an area still clinging to its fading coal town roots. Before Peabody left the area, it was typical talk that most young men would graduate high school and either go to college or go to the mines. While Jones was graduating SIUC with her B.A. in Creative Writing, her now-husband took employment in the mines. 

Jones received in her MFA in poetry from Murray State in 2014 and welcomed her first child in 2015. Her first chapbook, The Old Works (The Heartland Review Press, 2019), explores what it was like starting and raising a new family on the back of a dying industry, fraught with both financial instability and the ever-present possibility of serious injury or worse. The chapbook is both a love story for her husband and the beautiful, struggling slice of southern Illinois she calls home.

In 2020, Jones lost her daughter to a rare childhood lung cancer called Pleuropulmonary Blastoma Type 3. Since that time, she has focused her writing largely on telling her daughter's story the best that she can in order to bring more awareness to childhood cancer and, hopefully, more funding to research. In 2023, she welcomed her second child, returning some of the missing light to her world, and inspiring her book-in-progress to shift and grow in ways she hadn't expected.