El Jones Feature Performance and Workshop

All skill levels, members of the public, and students welcome!

There will be ASL interpreters at this event. 

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

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. 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.