Meta D Jones

Interests

Twentieth and Twenty-first Century American Poetry and Poetics, especially in relationship to gender, sexuality and performance studies; African-American Literature, Criticism and Theory, Textual Studies, Jazz, Gender and Sexuality studies, Visual Culture Studies

Biography

Meta DuEwa Jones is Assistant Professor in the English Department and a Faculty Affiliate of the Center for African and African-American Studies (CAAAS).  Her primary research interests include Twentieth and Twenty-first Century American Poetry and Poetics, especially in relationship to gender, sexuality and performance studies; African-American Literature, Criticism and Theory, Textual Studies, Jazz, Gender and Sexuality studies, Visual Culture Studies.  She currently serves as chair of the Executive Committee for the MLA Division for Black American Literature and Culture as well as the MLA Committee on the Structure and Governance of the Annual Convention.

 

Recent Publications:
Her scholarship on the relationship between jazz music, poetry and spoken word performance, The Muse is Music, is forthcoming in 2009 from the University of Illinois Press.

Selected Articles:
Co-Editor, with Shelly Fisher Fishkin, Gavin Jones, Arnold Rampersad and Richard Yarborough, Paul L. Dunbar 40th Anniversary Issue, African Amerian Review, Volume 41.2, Summer (2007)

“Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgment,” Essay Review of Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry, Eds. Aldon Nielsen and Laurie Ramey (University of Alabama Press, 2005), American Book Review, 28.2 January/February (2007): 1-5

“Reading Race, Reading Rivers: The Future of Black Aesthetics and Poetics,” Mixed Blood 3, Summer (2007): 16-32

 “Dancing the Distance between Cultural Studies and Poetics” Annotations in the Reading Lines Forum, Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, Fall (2006): 125-127

“Understanding the New Black Poetry:  Orality, Visuality and the Spoken Word,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, 5.1 Winter (2003): 16-31

"Listening to What the Ear Demands:  Langston Hughes and His Critics,"  Callaloo 25.4 (2002): 1145-1175

Interviews:
“‘Who is the Self Rooted in Language?’ An Interview with Elizabeth Alexander,” (AWP) The Writer’s Chronicle, October/November 39.2 (2006): 28-36.; Reprinted in Power, Possibility:  Essays, Reviews, Interviews; Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, (2007)

“An Interview with Michael Eric Dyson,” Hip-Hop Music Special Issue, Callaloo, 29.3 (2006): 786-802., Unabridged interview reprinted as "Prisons, Ipods, Pimps and the Search for Authentic Homes," in  Michael Eric Dyson,  Know What I Mean?:  Reflections on Hip Hop; New York:  Basic Civitas Books (2007): 3-58.

Creative Work:
“Black Hymnal,” “Graphs: Photos From A Traveler,” The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Turn South (University of Georgia Press, 2007): 102-103, 322-324

“Come On In My Kitchen, Bessie,” PMS: Poem/Memoir/Story 8, Spring (2008)

Awards/Honors: 
Professor DuEwa Jones has been a recipient of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship, (2008-2009);

the Dean’s Fellowship in The College of Liberal Arts (2007); and the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in the Diasporic Racisms Project at the Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS) (2003-2004).