Interview with I.S. Jones

I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet, essayist, and former music journalist. She is a Graduate Fellow with The Watering Hole and holds fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT Writer’s Retreat, and Brooklyn Poets. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, The Offing, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in Poetry at UW–Madison where she was the inaugural 2019–2020 Kemper K. Knapp University Fellowship and is the 2021–2022 Hoffman Hall Emerging Artist Fellowship recipient. For the last three years, she served as the Director of the Watershed Reading Series with Art + Literature Laboratory. I.S. Jones is the Editor-in-Chief of Frontier Poetry. Her chapbook Spells of My Name (2021) is out with Newfound.

Manahil: This is Canthius’ tenth issue, and the first for which we have a guest editor, Sanna Wani. Whether you’ve been a long-time reader of Canthius or are just getting introduced us, how did you come to decide what pieces you wanted to share with the magazine?

I.S.: Because I’m familiar with the work of Wani, I felt as though “Letter to Another Immigrant Daughter” which is after the poet Patrycja Humienik, was a good fit for the issue of Canthius she was trying to curate. I’m very grateful that the poem found a good home.

Manahil: I find writing often emerges from a conversation. What conversation is happening in your work?

I.S.: Before writing this poem, I was working with a lot of hard and difficult work regarding my first full-length collection. It was a challenge writing something a bit softer, tender, loving, but something that honors a fellow poet who is doing the work of my heart. It’s an endless delight to be in conversation with Humienik and an honor that she invited me to apart of this cycle that governs her debut collection Anchor Baby.

Manahil: In your poem, “Letter to another immigrant daughter,” the line, “to be a daughter is to be vast & resistant to borders” had me pause, breathless. There’s an expansiveness in your poem that reaches out and enfolds. In a world of borders, how does tenderness make touch possible?

I.S.: First, thank you! What a rich and delicious question. Touch manifests itself in different ways, right? Letters, pictures, keepsakes, phone calls, trinkets shared between friends. Unfortunately borders exists, and borders have shifted the very direction of history, but I am of the belief even borders can’t stop the reach of longing, of tenderness.

Manahil: What is something you’re working on that you’d like to share!

I.S.: So many things! I am on a break post-graduation, but I am working on my debut collection which reimagines Cain and Abel as sisters. I’m also launching a few contests for Frontier Poetry

Manahil: In closing, what is a poem, story, painting, chapbook, or book you would like to recommend others read?

I.S.: I am forever in love with Gabrielle Bates’s “Anniversary” and Sarah Ghazal Ali’s poem “Theophanies”! Both have debut collections forthcoming. A chapbook I love is Bloodwarm by thee hot girl Taylor Byas. A book I love that I am working through is Girls That Never Die by Safia Elhillo and Woman of Light by Kali Fajardo-Anstine.