Jacqueline Allen Trimble

Jacqueline Allen Trimble lives and writes in Montgomery, Alabama, where she is professor of English and the chairperson of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University. Her work has appeared in various journals including Poetry Magazine,   The Offing, the Louisville Review, and Poet Lore.  Her poetry collection, American Happiness, is published by NewSouth Books. The ironically titled book examines America’s refusal to grapple with hard truths, preferring instead the pretense that everyone and everything is just fine. Of the work Honorée Jeffers wrote, “I longed for her kind of poetry, these cut-to-the-flesh poems, this verse that sings the old time religion of difficult truths with new courage and utter sister-beauty,” and Randall Horton noted, “There is a jewel of a poet in the epicenter of Alabama who adeptly revisits the ugly of race, the power and legacy of familial bonds, the joys and beauty of growing up Southern—our complicated humanity.” She a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow (Poetry), an Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow and a Cave Canem Fellow.   American Happiness was named a poetry finalist and the Best Book of 2016 by the newly launched Seven Sisters Book Awards and won the 2016 Balcones Poetry Prize.  Trimble's next collection, How to Survive the Apocalypse, is forthcoming from NewSouth Books in spring 2022.