Television Fathers

Sylvia Jones’s Television Fathers creates a wholly new lens. With poems reminiscent of iconoclasts such as James Tate or Jay Wright, Jones’s voice is playful and pithy, simultaneously reimagining the past and reveling in the absurd contemporary—her gaze never straying from social inequity, nor from the personal scales of fate. A heavily saturated debut collection of unsuspecting interiority, Television Fathers is the future of modern poetry.

Sylvia Jones is a writer, editor, and prison abolitionist. Born in Staten Island and raised in Virginia, she works part-time as an adjunct lecturer in creative writing at Goucher College and George Washington University. She earned her MFA from American University in Washington D.C. and lives in Baltimore, MD. She also teaches poetry with the Goucher Prison Education Partnership. Her writing appears in DIAGRAM, Smartish Pace, the Santa Clara Review, Shenandoah, R & R Journal, The Poetry Society of New York, The Cortland Review, Sprung Formal and other notable publications. She has received support from the Cleveland Museum of Art; The Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts; Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts; Topical Cream; Poets at the End of the World; Mountaineer Books; OUTWriteDC; Literary Cleveland; The Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, and Transgender Community Center of New York; and the Maryland State Arts Council.