Arts & Culture at ABAC
2022-2023 Season
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Georgia Poetry Circuit
The Georgia Poetry Circuit was founded at Mercer University in 1985. It is a consortium of ten Georgia colleges and universities working together to bring poets of national and international reputation to all members’ campuses annually, providing important access to the literary arts for Georgia residents across the state. Each event is free and open to the public with no ticket required. Events are held in Edwards Hall on the Tift Campus.
Ashley M. Jones
Monday, November 7, 2022
7:00 PM
Edwards Hall, Tifton Campus
Ashley M. Jones is the Poet Laureate of the State of Alabama (2022-2026). She holds an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University, and is the author of Magic City Gospel, dark / / thing, and REPARATIONS NOW! Her poetry has earned several awards, including the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, a Literature Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. She co-directs PEN Birmingham and is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival. She teaches in the Creative Writing Department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts, and is part of the Core Faculty of the Converse University Low Residency MFA Program.
Courtney Faye Taylor
Monday, February 6, 2023
7:00 PM
Edwards Hall, Tifton Campus
Courtney Faye Taylor is the author of "Concentrate, forthcoming". It is the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize selected by Rachel Eliza Griffiths and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Courtney earned her BA from Agnes Scott College and her MFA from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program where she received the Hopwood Prize in Poetry. She is also the winner of the 92Y Discovery Prize and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Courtney’s work can be found in Poetry Magazine, The Nation, Ploughshares, Best New Poets, The New Republic and elsewhere.
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
Wednesday, April 5, 2023
7:00 PM
Edwards Hall, Tifton Campus
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke was born in Texas and raised in North Carolina, Canada, and on the Great Plains. Of mixed heritage, she is a poet, writer, and educator. She studied at North Carolina State University while a field worker, then studied script, performance and sound/light/film tech at Estelle Harmon’s Actor’s Workshop earning an AFAW in creative writing on the old Institute for American Indian Arts campus in Santa Fe, attended two Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Summer Writing Programs, and earned an MFA from Vermont College (1995) where she stayed for graduate work. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Year of the Rat, and the full-length poetry collections Dog Road Woman, Off-Season City Pipe, Blood Run, Streaming, an illustrated special edition Burn, and the memoir Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer. Streaming comes with a full album recorded in the Rd Klā project period with Kelvyn Bell and Laura Ortman. One inclusion was selected by Motion Poems and Pixel Farms to be made into an animated film and several of the poems in Streaming also influenced the documentary project she directed, Red Dust.