Keith Jones is the author of the poetry books and chapbooks, Echo’s Errand (Black Ocean), blue lake of tensile fire (Projective Industries), shorn ellipses (Morning House), the lucid upward ladder (Verse), Fugue Meadow (Ricochet Editions), and Surface to Air, Residuals of Basquiat (Pressed Wafer). An earlier version of his poetry manuscript Echo’s Errand was a finalist for both the 2016 Numinous Orisons, Luminous Origins Literary Award (Agape Editions) and the 1913 Prize for 1st Books (1913 Press). His poetry chapbook the lucid upward ladder was a finalist for the 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize (Verse Magazine). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Barrow Street, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Flag + Void, Harvard Review, HERE, Let the Bucket Down, No Infinite, Positive Magnets, The Winter Anthology, Transition, Verse, and elsewhere. His essays and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in MELUS, Consequence Magazine, and Stylus, the blog of the Woodberry Poetry Room, at Harvard University. His poem, "Echoes," was named a finalist for the 2020 Omnidawn Single Poem Broadside Prize. The chapbook, Limbs of Earth, was also named a finalist for the 2020 Omnidawn Chapbook Prize. His book of poems, Echo’s Errand, has been described by the Colorado Review as “a rare poetry that feels the reverberations of humanity’s long harming and being harmed, and yet can also vibrate with a nearly cosmic hope.”
A scholar and teacher of African diasporic and multi-ethnic literatures, decolonial theory, critical pedagogy, and poetry and poetics, he teaches as well in the Africana Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He has over 20 years of teaching experience across a broad range of educational spaces and student communities. In 2021, he received the Chancellor’s Distinguished Service Award from the University of Massachusetts Boston for his leadership in campus-wide efforts to help transform the university into an anti-racist and health-promoting public research institution.
He holds a B.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz, an M.A. from California State University, Long Beach, and a Ph.D. from Duke University.