Dr. Jacqueline Allen Trimble

Announcement

After a unanimous vote at the Annual AWC Membership Meeting following the 2025 Annual Conference in Orange Beach, Dr. Jacqueline Allen Trimble was named Poet Laureate of the state of Alabama. She will serve a four-year term from 2026-2029. Jacqueline Allen Trimble lives and writes in Montgomery, Alabama. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow (Poetry), a Cave Canem Fellow, and a two-time Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow (2017, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in various journals including Poetry, The Louisville Review, The Offing, The Rumpus, Salvation South, Gravy, and Poet Lore and has also been featured by the Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day several times, Poetry Daily, and Poem-a Day. Her work is included in the following anthologies: This is The Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (Little Brown, 2024), a collection of the best of contemporary African American poetry; All Night, All Day: Life, Death and Angels, (Madville Publishing, 2023), a collection of poems and essays about angels; The Beautiful: Poet’s Reimagine a Nation (Galaula Arts), a collection of visual poems from each U.S. state and a traveling exhibit; The Night’s Magician (Negative Capability Press), a collection of eighty poems by contemporary writers on the moon, and her essays on writing appear in Southern Writers on Writing (University Press of Mississippi), essays from twenty-six contemporary Southern writers, and Old Enough, (UGA Press, 2024) a collection of essays on aging and creativity. She wrote five episodes for the first season of Die Testament, a South African soap opera that streamed on Netwerk24 in Fall of 2019 and eight episodes for the second season, Die Testament 2, which aired in Spring 2022. Published by NewSouth Books, American Happiness, her debut poetry collection, won the 2016 Balcones Poetry Prize. The book examines America’s refusal to grapple with hard truths, preferring instead the pretense that everyone and everything is just fine. Of the work Honorée Jeffers wrote, “I longed for her kind of poetry, these cut-to-the-flesh poems, this verse that sings the old time religion of difficult truths with new courage and utter sister-beauty.” How to Survive the Apocalypse, her second poetry collection, was published by NewSouth Books, an imprint of UGA Press, in August 2022 and was listed as one of the top ten best poetry books of 2022 by New York Public Library. Randall Horton writes about the book, “Not since Carolyn Rogers have we heard a voice this bold buttressed by poetic craft. It’s all here—the energy and excitement of Black idiom reimagined as contemporary art, the beautiful defiance of a balled fist disguised as love.” She has served on the board of Alabama Writers’ Forum for many years, holding offices as president and secretary/treasurer of that organization, on a number of statewide committees including the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame Selection Committee, the Harper Lee Award Selection Committee, the literary fellowship committee for ASCA, and the Alabama Book Festival Committee, and a number of national committees for the National Endowment for the Arts. She has also served as judge of numerous poetry contests including those run by the Poetry Foundation and the National Poetry Series. Trimble earned a B.A. from Huntingdon College and a M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Alabama. She is a Professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University.

The Alabama State Poet Laureate Selection Committee for this term included:

Tina Mozelle Braziel: Board member of Alabama Writers Forum and Alabama Writers’ Cooperative, winner of the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for her poetry collection Known by Salt, and coauthor of Glass Cabin
Dr. Jessica Temple: AWC Board Member, Alabama State Poetry Society Board Member, faculty at Northwest Florida State College, and author of Daughters of Bone and Seamless and Other Legends
Jason McCall: faculty at the University of North Alabama and author of the essay collections Razed by TV Sets and Dear Hero, winner of the 2012 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize
Katherine Webb: editor of Hub City Press and writer, editor, and educator in Alabama, whose work has appeared in the NYT, the Bitter Southerner, and other locations
Kwoya Fagin-Maples: faculty at the University of Alabama, author of forthcoming Long Eye and MEND, and co-editor of I Witness, an Anthology of Documentary Poems

Trimble was chosen from among a very distinguished group of potential nominees received by the Poet Laureate Nominations Committee, according to Tina Mozelle Braziel, the committee chair.

Tina Mozelle Braziel chaired the selection committee, and she had this to say of the decision:

“I think we are truly in the golden age of writing in Alabama,” Braziel said, describing the difficult decisions made during deliberations to choose one among such a strong group of poets. The AWC, which has been supporting and inspiring writers in their writing of all forms since 1923, is charged by the Alabama Legislature to provide the governor with an official state poet laureate as a term is coming to an end. The nomination process takes place every four years. As Trimble stepped to the microphone at the end of the meeting, while wiping away a few tears, she said, “I am rarely brought to tears, but this is one of the best moments of my life, so far.”

“We are beyond thrilled with Jacqueline Trimble’s election, and we know that she will serve the state of Alabama well. We’re grateful for her beautiful poems, her passion for teaching and for helping others.

- AWC President Jessica Langston

Dr. Jacqueline Allen Trimble had this to share:

“Alabama has been blessed with a rich literary tradition. The talent that exists and has always existed here is second to none. I am honored, humbled, and deeply moved by the faith the Alabama Writers Cooperative and the writers of Alabama have placed in me to be the chief champion of poetry in this state. I walk in the footsteps of wonderful poet laureates, and I hope to continue their work of bringing well-deserved attention to this state’s literary abundance. The world needs to know our Alabama poets, and I look forward to working with organizations and individual artists to encourage emerging and established writers, create new ways of engaging readers, and support the beautiful and important work of poetry in this state.”