ASPS Spring Workshop in Orange Beach

WORKSHOP LEADER AND SPEAKER BIOS

Jacqueline Allen Trimble lives and writes in Montgomery, Alabama, where she is a Professor of English and the chairperson of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University. She holds three degrees in English: the B.A. from Huntingdon College, and the M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Alabama.   She is the current board president of the Alabama Writers Forum, and a member of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Museum Board, serving as chairperson of the literary arts award committee for high school and college students.   She has won several teaching and writing awards, including the Exemplary Teacher Award (for junior faculty), The Todd Award for Outstanding Teaching (for senior faculty), The Julia Lightfoot Sellers Award (given by the Huntingdon College junior and senior class to the faculty member who has most inspired them to learning), and The University of Alabama’s Outstanding Dissertation of the Year Award, for Race, Gender Culture in Adrienne Kennedy’s  In One Act, an analysis of the playwright Adrienne Kennedy’s absurd dramas through the lens of feminist/womanist theory. 

Her research interests include 20th century black women writers, feminist theory, and representations of race and gender in popular culture.  She is also a poet.  Her work has appeared in The Offing, Blue Lake Review, The Louisville Review and The Griot. American Happiness, her first collection is published by NewSouth Books.  The ironically titled book examines America’s refusal to grapple with hard truths, preferring instead the pretense that everyone and everything is just fine.   Recently awarded a Key West Literary Seminar scholarship, she is currently a Cave Canem fellow and the recipient of a 2017 literary arts fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts. American Happiness won the 2016 Balcones Poetry Prize and was named best book of 2016 by the new Seven Sisters Book Awards. 

Adam Vines graduated with his Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in English from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He then received his MFA from the University of Florida in 2006, where he also taught and earned the Excellence in Teaching Award from the University Writing Program in 2005. He is now an assistant professor at UAB, where he teaches poetry writing workshops and earned the Core Teaching Award from the UAB English Department in 2008.  

He has published work in Kenyon Review, Southwest Review, Poetry, and many others.  He was named the Tennessee Williams Scholar at the 2008 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. At UAB, he is on faculty at the annual Ada Long Creative Writers’ Workshop for high school students. Also for UAB, Adam has been the editor of Birmingham Poetry Review (BPR) since 2011. In 2012, Adam was among the featured debut poets in Poets and Writers, and was granted the Individual Artist Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts (ASCA) the following year. His collection of poetry entitled The Coal Life was nominated for The Poet’s Prize in 2014. He also published a collaborative collection of poetry with Allen Jih entitled According to Discretion. Most recently, Adam was awarded the William Alexander II & Lisa Percy Fellowship at the Rivendell Writers’ Colony in Sewanee for a residency in spring 2017. 

Adam’s current project is a collection of ekphrastic poems inspired by his love of visual art. These poems will center on the fascinating interactions between people and the art they observe at museums. Some of these have recently been published in  32 Poems, Gulf Coast, and The Southwest Review, among others.

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