About the Author
El Jones
Author
El Jones is a poet, journalist, professor and activist living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She teaches at Mount Saint Vincent University, where she was named the 15th Nancy’s Chair in Women’s Studies in 2017. She was Halifax’s Poet Laureate from 2013 to 2015. She is the author of Live from the Afrikan Resistance!, a collection of poems about resisting white colonialism. Her work focuses on social justice issues, such as feminism, prison abolition, anti-racism and decolonization. Since 2016, she has co-hosted a radio show called Black Power Hour, on CKDU-FM where listeners from prisons call in to rap and read their poetry, providing a voice to people who rarely get a wide audience.
Related Blog Posts
This Week in Lit Events: January 22-28th
Lots of reading series to hit this week, plus our first festival of the year: the SPARKS Literary Festival in St. John's Newfoundland!
Are you hosting an event featuring an author whose titles are available on All Lit Up? Send the event details, including author, book, date, ... Read more
Joyfully: Reading as Generative Resistance
I need family. I want community.
I need to read. I want to be read.
(from Shannon Webb-Campbell “Needs vs Wants” Still No Word)
What do we need to survive? What do we want to aid us ... Read more
Pan Lit Games: Boxing
Just like with our first PanLit Games competition, discus throw, our second competition has been around for centuries. Boxing has traditions that go back as far as ancient Rome and Greece but it wasn’t until the 1700s that rules were first introduced (eeeekkk!). These ... Read more
Jules' Tools for Social Change: A Black History Month Booklist
Welcome to this month’s edition of Jules’ Tools for Social Change, a column that features a book, author or publisher whose work deals with issues of race, gender, sexuality, ability, colonialism, economic justice, or other social justice topics.
Poetry: The Perpetually Revolutionary Art
Twentieth Century Mexican history has given the world the wonderfully oxymoronic political entity, The Party of the Institutionalized Revolution (which sounds a bit like Canada’s Progressive Conservative party). I think of it whenever I think about reports of 1) the demise ... Read more
Poetry in Motion: The Spoken Word as a Tool of Liberation – El Jones
Though Live from the Afrikan Resistance (Roseway Publishing, 2014) is El Jones' first book of poetry, she is by no means a debut poet. The text represents seven years of spoken word performances from Jones, Halifax's Poet Laureate, that borrow their style from musical ... Read more
CoCoPoPro: Kathy Mac and the art of Dog-Nannying
We're on day 26 of our Coast-to-Coast Poetry Project, and we're going to spend our last few days of National Poetry Month exploring the East Coast. For more than five years, poet Kathy Mac had the most unique job--she was a dog nanny. She lived in Sambro Head, Nova Scotia, and ... Read more
