Poetry Consultations with MJ Jones -

Michal ‘MJ’ Jones (they/he) is an award-winning poet, parent, and editor living in Oakland, CA. Their poetry has appeared in the American Academy of Poets, Obsidian, Split This Rock, Muzzle Magazine, TriQuarterly Review, ANMLY, & elsewhere. Their debut collection of poetry, HOOD VACATIONS, won the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. They are also the author of a chapbook, SOFT ARMOR (2023), from Black Lawrence Press. Often addressing the troubling and haunting aspects of life, violence, and identity, MJ’s poetry blends lyrical, documentary, and confessional modes.

MJ will provide detailed comments on your manuscript as well as a cover letter. After receiving these files, participants who submit chapbooks and full-length manuscripts may also book phone/video conferences with them at no additional charge.

MJ is accepting single poems, folios, chapbooks, and full-length collections for critique. The fees and parameters for each of these categories are as follows:

Single poems up to 2 pages in length, $25
Folios of up to 5 poems, up to 7 pages in length $55
Chapbooks, up to 40 pages in length, $275
Full-length manuscripts, up to 80 pages in length, $425

All manuscripts should be formatted in 12-point font.

All manuscripts should be formatted in 12-point font. The deadline to submit work for this consultation program is September 30. MJ will complete their work and respond to all participants by October 31.

Poetry Consultations with MJ Jones

Click Here to Submit Deadline: September 30 How to submit ›

Statement of Purpose

Poetry represents an opportunity to constantly reinvent; to find new words, arrangements, landscapes, and forms with which to express the age-old. I am drawn in by poems that take and then refill my body’s breath. With softness or boldness, a poem must say something beyond beauty and lyric. It must enact. It must make a declaration. It must lead to revolution. It must shock the reader with its aliveness of witness.

When is a poem done, then? We’re rarely blessed with the final poem in our first draft. Our early versions are often akin to channeling, to birthing; revision, then, is the tender care we take to shape and raise the best of our language to fullness. As an editor and consultant, it is my task to understand why you must write, to understand how important your work is to you, to identify your unique poetic cadence. I will treat it with care and grace.

To share these tender beings we call poems with others is an act of bravery, and I am grateful to read them. I can’t wait to enter the world through your words.

Michal ‘MJ’ Jones

Michal ‘MJ’ Jones (they/he) is an award-winning poet, parent, and editor living in Oakland, CA. Their poetry has appeared in the American Academy of Poets, Obsidian, Split This Rock, Muzzle Magazine, TriQuarterly Review, ANMLY, & elsewhere. Their debut collection of poetry, HOOD VACATIONS, won the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. They are also the author of a chapbook, SOFT ARMOR (2023), from Black Lawrence Press. Often addressing the troubling and haunting aspects of life, violence, and identity, MJ’s poetry blends lyrical, documentary, and confessional modes.

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How to Submit

Black Lawrence Press accepts submissions and payment of the entry fee exclusively through our online submission manager, Subfolio. We are not able to accept submissions via email or postal mail.

Michal ‘MJ’ Jones

Works By Michal ‘MJ’ Jones

Soft Armor

Hood Vacations

How to Submit