Gayl Jones
Poet, fiction writer, and critic Gayl Jones was born in Lexington, Kentucky, on November 23, 1949, and raised in Speigle Heights, a neighborhood in Lexington. Her father, Franklin, was a restaurant cook, while her mother, Lucille, was a homemaker and aspiring writer who shared with Jones and her younger brother, Franklin Jr., stories about their family in rural Kentucky as well as local oral traditions. During an interview with poet Michael S. Harper, Jones recalled that she learned to write by listening to people talk. She began writing stories at age seven. Jones attended high school at the predominately white and academically prestigious Henry Clay High School, at the insistence of her mother. Jones attracted attention for her writing ability, despite her discomfort with speaking. Her academic acumen won her a scholarship to Connecticut College, which she obtained with the assistance of a teacher and the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. While there, Jones studied with visiting professor and poet Robert Hayden. Jones received awards for both her fiction and poetry while attending college. She graduated with honors in 1971.
Jones next enrolled at Brown University, where she wrote short fiction as well as the early drafts of her future novels Eva’s Man (Random House, 1976) and Corregidora (Random House, 1975), both of which were later published under the stewardship of then book editor Toni Morrison. At Brown, Jones was mentored by Harper, who was then a professor at the university. It was Harper who encouraged Jones to write poetry. Jones earned an MA in creative writing in 1973 and a doctor of arts degree in 1975. She also wrote and published the plays The Ancestor: A Street Play (1975) and Chile Woman (1974) while still enrolled at graduate school.
In 1977, Jones published the short story collection White Rat (Random House, 1977), which was rereleased by Harlem Moon in 2005 and by Beacon Press in 2024. Jones’s more recent prose works are her second short story collection, Butter: Novellas, Stories, and Fragments (Beacon Press, 2023); Palmares (Beacon Press, 2021), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; Mosquito (Beacon Press, 1999); and The Healing (Beacon Press, 1998), which was nominated for a National Book Award in Fiction. Jones has also published poetry in several magazines and in three collections: Xarque and Other Poems (Lotus Press, 1985); The Hermit-Woman (Lotus Press, 1983); and Song for Anninho (Lotus Press 1981), later rereleased by Beacon Press in 1999 and again in 2022 as Song for Almeyda & Song for Anninho. In 1991, Jones published the critical work, Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (Harvard University Press). In this critical work, Jones studied the influences of dialect, spirituals, blues, and folklore in the poetry of Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Langston Hughes as well as in the prose of Morrison, Jean Toomer, and others.
Jones has taught at the University of Michigan and Wellesley College. In 1975, she won the Howard Foundation Award. In the following year, Jones received the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She was next awarded a fellowship from the Michigan Society of Fellows (1977–79).
Jones continues to live a private life in Kentucky, refusing requests for interviews.