Jones, Sylvia: Television Fathers

Meekling Press, paperback

Publication Date: October 1, 2024

Publisher Marketing: 

Sylvia Jones’s Television Fathers creates a wholly new lens. With poems reminiscent of iconoclasts such as James Tate or Jay Wright, Jones’s voice is playful and pithy, simultaneously reimagining the past and reveling in the absurd contemporary—her gaze never straying from social inequity, nor from the personal scales of fate. A heavily saturated debut collection of unsuspecting interiority, Television Fathers is the future of modern poetry.

Sylvia Jones is a writer, editor, and prison abolitionist. Born in Staten Island and raised in Virginia, she works part-time as an adjunct lecturer in creative writing at Goucher College and George Washington University. She earned her MFA from American University in Washington D.C. and lives in Baltimore, MD. She also teaches poetry with the Goucher Prison Education Partnership. Her writing appears in DIAGRAM, Smartish Pace, the Santa Clara Review, Shenandoah, R & R Journal, The Poetry Society of New York, The Cortland Review, Sprung Formal and other notable publications. She has received support from the Cleveland Museum of Art; The Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts; Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts; Topical Cream; Poets at the End of the World; Mountaineer Books; OUTWriteDC; Literary Cleveland; The Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, and Transgender Community Center of New York; and the Maryland State Arts Council.

“Television Fathers is a transmission for our end-of-times, a prophecy priced out of the zeitgeist–and only Sylvia Jones can say it.” –ASHLEIGH BRYANT PHILLIPS

“The poems in Sylvia Jones’s Television Fathers read as if they were written tomorrow, but it’s a tomorrow in which everybody’s senses are keener than we can expect them to be.” –SHANE McCRAE

“Thank god we have a poet named Sylvia Jones… The poems in Television Fathers defy easy categorization, they take risks, they make me laugh, they wrestle with big issues… It’s a blessing to read a poet who doesn’t pander, a poet who is so completely herself.” –JOSEPH GRANTHAM