Lullaby for the Grieving

A Shelf Awareness 2025 Best Book of the Year
Southern Literary Review's Best Poetry Book of the Year
Maya Angelou Book Award 2025, Poetry, longlist

With previous work hailed by the New York Times as “unflinching” and “piercing”, Ashley M. Jones’s Lullaby for the Grieving is her most personal collection to date.

In her fourth poetry collection, Jones studies the multifaceted nature of grief: the personal grief of losing her father, and the political grief tied to Black Southern identity. How does one find a path through the deep sorrow of losing a parent? What wonders of Blackness have to be suppressed to make way for "progress"?

Journeying through landscapes of Alabama, the Middle Passage and Underground Railroad, interior spaces of loss and love, and her father’s garden, Jones constructs both an elegy for her father and a celebration of the sacred exuberance and audacity of life. Featuring poems from her tenure as Alabama’s first Black and youngest Poet Laureate, Lullaby for the Grieving finds calm in unimaginable storms and attempts to listen for the sounds of healing.

Ashley M. Jones served as the first Black and youngest Poet Laureate of Alabama from 2022-2026. She is the author of three previous collections of poetry, including Reparations Now!, longlisted for the PEN Voelker Poetry Award. Jones and her work have been featured by Poetry, Good Morning America, the BBC, the New York Times and other publications. Jones holds an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University, and she is currently a PhD student in English at Old Dominion University. She is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival in Birmingham, Alabama.