SHP Presents: An Evening with Spencer Reece, Ashley M. Jones, & Rick Mulkey (via Zoom)


Slapering Hol Press welcomes you for this wonderful reading. It will take place on Zoom. The link will be sent to the email that you use to register as soon as you reserve a spot. (Please check your spam folder and save the link to your calendar.) It will also be sent to you the day of the reading for your convenience. For questions email ask@writerscenter.org for more information. The reading is free but your donations toward the readers’ honoraria is much appreciated.

Spencer Reece earned a BA at Wesleyan University, an MA at the University of York, an MTS at Harvard Divinity School, and a Master’s degree at Yale Divinity School. He was ordained in the Episcopal Church in 2011. Reece’s debut collection of poetry, The Clerk’s Tale (2004), was chosen for the Poetry Prize by Louise Glück. His second collection, The Road to Emmaus (2013), was longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Griffin Prize. His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a Witter Bynner fellowship from the Library of Congress, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and a Whiting Writers’ Award. Reece won a Fulbright grant to work on a collaborative poetry project with children at a girl’s orphanage in Honduras in 2012-2013. His experience is the subject of the documentary Voices Beyond the Wall: Orphan Poets of Honduras. His memoir, The Secret Gospel of Mark, was published in 2021. He worked on it for seventeen years.

Ashley M. Jones is Poet Laureate of the state of Alabama (2022-2026). She received an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University (FIU), where she was a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellow. She served as Official Poet for the City of Sunrise, Florida’s Little Free Libraries Initiative from 2013-2015, and her work was recognized in the 2014 Poets and Writers Maureen Egen Writer’s Exchange Contest and the 2015 Academy of American Poets Contest at FIU. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including CNN, the Academy of American Poets, POETRY, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Steel Toe Review, Fjords Review, Poets Respond to Race Anthology, Night Owl, The Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, pluck!, Valley Voices: New York School Edition, Fjords Review: Black American Edition, PMSPoemMemoirStory (where her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2016), Kinfolks Quarterly, Tough Times in America Anthology, and Lucid Moose Press’ Like a Girl: Perspectives on Femininity Anthology. She received a 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a 2015 B-Metro Magazine Fusion Award. Her debut poetry collection, Magic City Gospel, was published by Hub City Press in January 2017, and it won the silver medal in poetry in the 2017 Independent Publishers Book Awards. Her second book, dark // thing, won the 2018 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry from Pleiades Press. Her third collection, REPARATIONS NOW! was published in Fall 2021 from Hub City Press. She won the 2018 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize from Backbone Press, and she is the 2019 winner of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Jones is a recipient of a Poetry Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and a 2020 Alabama Author award from the Alabama Library Association. She was a finalist for the Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship in 2020, and her collection, REPARATIONS NOW! was on the longlist for the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where she is founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, board member of the Alabama Writers Cooperative and the Alabama Writers Forum, co-director of PEN Birmingham, and a faculty member in the Creative Writing Department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts. Jones is also a member of the Core Faculty at the Converse University Low Residency MFA Program. She recently served as a guest editor for Poetry Magazine. In 2022, she received a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets.

Rick Mulkey is the author of six collections, including All These Hungers, Ravenous: New & Selected Poems, Toward Any Darkness, Before the Age of Reason, and Bluefield Breakdown. Individual poems and essays have appeared widely, including Poetry East, Georgia Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Shenandoah, Poetry Daily, and the anthologies American Poetry: the Next Generation, The Southern Poetry Anthology: Volumes I and II, and A Millennial Sampler of South Carolina Poetry, among others. His awards include the Hawthornden Fellowship, the Charles Angoff Award from The Literary Review, and the Gearhart Poetry Prize from Southeast Review. Mulkey is director and co-founder of the Converse Low Residency MFA.

Event Location and Ticket Information

Date: Wednesday, February 1, 2023
Times: 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm

Ticket pricing:
Free event
Get tickets now

Presenter: Hudson Valley Writers Center
Presenter Phone: 914.332.5953
Presenter Website: writerscenter.org