Our annual awards celebration will be held as a reception on Wednesday, April 13, from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Awards in the 2022 AMP Communications Contest will be presented, our 2022 Communicator of Achievement will be announced and new officers will be installed (read more about the new officers below). A light, buffet-style meal will be provided. Please RSVP by April 6 by clicking the button below.

As part of the event, Ashley M. Jones, Alabama's youngest poet laureate and the first Black woman to hold that office, will read some of her poetry and conduct a Q&A session. Jones earned a master of fine arts in poetry from Florida International University, and she is the author of Magic City Gospel, dark // thing and REPARATIONS NOW!

Jones’ 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. She was a finalist for the Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship in 2020, and her collection, REPARATIONS NOW! was on the longlist for the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. 

Her poems and essays appear in or are forthcoming at CNN, POETRY, The Oxford American, Origins Journal, The Quarry by Split This Rock, Obsidian, and many others.

Jones co-directs PEN Birmingham, and she is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival. She teaches in the Creative Writing Department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts, and she is part of the Core Faculty of the Converse University Low Residency MFA Program. She recently served as a guest editor for Poetry Magazine.

Please purchase event tickets and RSVP here by April 6. 

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The event will be in the "Inn Room" and on the adjoining patio. You should park in "The Grill" parking lot. You can then walk straight to the Inn Room by taking the sidewalk on the right as you approach The Grill. It's a small sidewalk that veers to the right just before the steps to The Grill.