El Jones

El Jones is a poet, professor and activist living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was born in Wales and grew up in Winnipeg.[1] She was Halifax's Poet Laureate from 2013 to 2015.[2] Her book, Live From the Afrikan Resistance! published in 2014 by Roseway, an imprint of Fernwood Publishing,[3] is a collection of poems about resisting white colonialism.[4] In 2015, she was a resident at the International Writing Program at University of Iowa.[5][6] Her work focuses on social justice issues such as feminism, prison abolition, anti-racism, and decolonization;[7] she wrote in the Washington Post in June 2020 about "the realities of white-supremacist oppression that black people in Canada have long experienced."[8]

Since 2016, she has co-hosted a radio show called Black Power Hour on CKDU-FM, an educational program which provides information on Black history and culture aimed at incarcerated people.[9] Listeners from prisons call in to rap and read poetry that they have written, providing a voice to people who rarely get a wide audience.[10] She is a contributor to the Halifax Examiner and the Huffington Post Canada.[11] She has taught at Dalhousie University, Acadia University, Nova Scotia Community College, Saint Mary's University and Mount Saint Vincent University.[12] In 2017, she was named the 15th Nancy's Chair in Women's Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University.[13]