Jacqueline Allen Trimble

Jacqueline Allen Trimble is a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow (Poetry), a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, and an Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow (2017, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in various journals including Poetry Magazine, The Louisville Review, The Offing, The Rumpus, Salvation South, and Poet Lore, has been featured by the Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day twice, Poetry Daily, and Poem-a Day, and appears in the anthologies This is The Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (Little Brown, 2024), All Night, All Day: Life, Death and Angels, (Madville Publishing), The Beautiful: Poet’s Reimagine a Nation (Galaula Arts), The Night’s Magician (Negative Capability Press). Essays on writing include “A Woman Explains How Learning Poetry is Poetry and Not Magic Made Her a Poet” in Southern Writers on Writing (University Press of Mississippi), and “I Have Seen the Promised Land and It’s Me,” in Old Enough, (UGA Press). She has also written episodes for Die Testament and Die Testament 2, South African soap operas. Published by NewSouth Books, American Happiness, her debut poetry collection won the 2016 Balcones Poetry Prize. Of the work Honorée Fannone 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.” How to Survive the Apocalypse, her second poetry collection, was listed as one of the top ten best poetry books of 2022 by New York Public Library.  Randall Horton writes about the book, “Not since Carolyn Rogers have we heard a voice this bold buttressed by poetic craft. It’s all here—the energy and excitement of Black idiom reimagined as contemporary art, the beautiful defiance of a balled fist disguised as love.” Trimble earned the B.A. from Huntingdon College and the M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Alabama.  She is Professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University.