Illinois Authors

Whittney Jones

Born:
Connection to Illinois: Jones was born and raised in small town southern Illinois. She still calls this area home today.

Biography: Whittney Jones has had poems published in Blackbird, Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, Third Coast, Zone 3, and elsewhere. She won the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award in the 2014 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition. In 2020, Jones lost her only child at the time to a rare childhood lung cancer called Pleuropulmonary Blastoma Type 3. Since this loss, Jones has invested everything into telling her daughter's story the best that she can in order to bring more awareness to childhood cancer and, hopefully, more funding to research.

• Winner, Illinois Emerging Writers Competition, Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, 2014

Primary Literary Genre(s): Poetry

Primary Audience(s): Adult readers

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/whittjonespoet/
WorldCat: http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=Whittney++Jones

Selected Titles

The Old Works ISBN: 0999686879 OCLC: 1114267578 Heartland Review Press 2019 This is Whittney Jones' first volume of poems. She was born and raised in small town southern Illinois, in an area still clinging to its fading coal town roots. As most men, young and old alike, were wont to do, her husband found his career in coal. This collection explores what it was like starting and raising a new family on the back of a dying industry, fraught with both financial instability and the ever-present possibility of serious injury or worse. The book is both a love story for her husband and the beautiful, struggling slice of southern Illinois she calls home.