The American Poetry Review Presents: I.S. Jones & Nicole Sealey

Please join us for a celebration of the 2025 winner of The APR/Honickman First Book Prize, by I.S. Jones, selected by Nicole Sealey. The evening will feature readings from both prize-winning poets and a book signing.

reimagines Cain and Abel as sisters and follows them through the dense geography of girlhood into young womanhood to explore love, sex, and faith. “Violence is a failure of communication,” this riveting collection begins, as we join a family enduring exile from Eden. Lush with tender imagination, Bloodmercy marks a debut to watch.

I.S. Jones is a Nigerian-American poet and editor. She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Callaloo, The Watering Hole, Brooklyn Poets, and Bread Loaf, where she was the 2023 Rona Jaffe Scholar in poetry. Since 2019, she has served as an editor at . Currently, she is a senior editor for Poetry Northwest. Her chapbook Spells of My Name was selected for Newfound’s 2021 Emerging Poets Series. She is the 2024-2025 Black Arts Consortium Artist-in-Residence at Northwestern University.

Nicole Sealey is the author of , winner of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, and an excerpt from which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She is also the author of , finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and , winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. With poet John Murillo, she edited the anthology . Her honors include the Princeton Arts and Hodder Fellowships from Princeton University, a Cullman Center Fellowship from the New York Public Library, a Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, the Poetry International Prize, an Amy Clampitt Residency, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University.

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