Please join us in celebrating the beginning of Black History Month and the launch of THE BOOK OF AWESOME BLACK AMERICANS, featuring Monique's sister/special guest/local poet Ashley M. Jones.

Monique Jones is an entertainment and pop culture writer, media critic, and TV/Film reviewer. Jones has written for ShockYa, TV Equals, Racialicious, Black Girl Nerds, The Nerds of Color, Tor, Ebony, Entertainment Weekly, SlashFilm, The Birmingham Times and The Miami New Times. She also writes about pop culture and media as it relates to race, culture, and representation at JUST ADD COLOR (colorwebmag.com).

Ashley M. Jones holds an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University, and she is the author of Magic City Gospel and dark / / thing. Her poetry has earned several awards, including the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, a Literature Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. Her poems and essays appear in or are forthcoming at CNN, The Oxford American, Origins Journal, The Quarry by Split This Rock, Obsidian, and many others. She teaches at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, she co-directs PEN Birmingham, and she is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival.