"The Birds of Djakarta"

St. Andrews College Press of Laurinburg has just released The Birds of Djakarta, a new collection of poems by Wilmington author Jean Jones ($10). The title poem includes an oblique reference to the author's Indonesian ancestry.

Read the review of this book on the website for the Wilmington Star News (Wilmington, NC).

A longtime Wilmington resident, Jones graduated from the University of North Carolina Wilmington (where he won the book award in what was then the Creative Writing Program) and went on to earn an MFA from Bowling Green State University.

As Ryan David Miller writes in the book's introduction, "He knows everyone, has been published in stacks upon stacks of local and non-local publications and is always putting something together or talking about poetry ..." Jones has been long associated with the online poetry zine Word Salad, and his work has appeared in St. Andrews Review, Pembroke Magazine, Kansas Quarterly, fuse magazine, Beautiful Nuance (which awarded the title poem its LizaBeth Poetry Award), King David, Decompositions and Quill & Ink, to give a partial list. His previous anthologies include Beyond Good and Evil.

Jones is co-host (with Scott Urban) of the monthly writing workshop for the Wilmington Writers Forum at Bottega Gallery downtown. The next session is 7 p.m. Thursday, July 10, in the gallery at 208 N. Front St. For details, call 763-3737.

Copies of The Birds of Djakarta are available at Pomegranate Books and Two Sisters Bookery.