Join us for an 8 spot open mic followed by a feature with Ashley Jones and Tina Mozelle Braziel! Then we will have our final team slam to determine who will be on our 2019 Slam Team! 12 Poets enter, 6 will move on to finals to battle it out for the top 5 spots.

About the features:

Tina Mozelle Braziel won the 2017 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for her book Known by Salt (Anhinga Press). She is the author of Rooted by Thirst (Porkbelly Press). Her work also appears in The Cincinnati Review, Southern Humanities Review, Tampa Review, and other journals. She has been awarded a fellowship for the Alabama State Council for the Arts and she served as an artist-in-residence at Hot Springs National Park. She directs the Ada Long Creative Writing Workshop at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and she and her husband, novelist James Braziel, live and write in a glass cabin that they are building by hand.   

Ashley M. Jones received an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University.  Her debut poetry collection, Magic City Gospel, was published by Hub City Press in January 2017, and it won the silver medal in poetry in the 2017 Independent Publishers Book Awards. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including the Academy of American Poets, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Steel Toe Review, The Sun, Poets Respond to Race Anthology, and The Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy. She received a 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a 2015 B-Metro Magazine Fusion Award. Her second collection, dark / / thing, won the 2018 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry from Pleiades Press and is forthcoming in February 2019. She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where she is Second Vice President of the Alabama Writers’ Conclave , founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, and a faculty member in the Creative Writing Department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts.