Jacqueline Allen Trimble
Photo by Marcus Jackson
JACQUELINE ALLEN TRIMBLE lives and writes in Montgomery, Alabama, where she is a professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University. Her work has appeared in various online and print publications including Poetry Magazine, Poet Lore, The Offing, The Louisville Review, and Blue Lake Review. American Happiness (2016), her first collection, published by NewSouth Books, won the Balcones Poetry Prize. How to Survive the Apocalypse, her new collection, is available August 2022.
“Jacqueline Trimble’s AMERICAN HAPPINESS is an amazing read." Marge Piercy Made in Detroit and The Hunger Moon
Praise
Praise for American Happiness
“Jacqueline Trimble’s AMERICAN HAPPINESS is an amazing read. Once I started these poems, once I had finished the first poem about her father, I could not stop reading but continued devouring them until I had finished them all. These poems are strong, passionate, well crafted. “
Marge Piercy Made in Detroit and The Hunger Moon
“There is a jewel of a poet in the epicenter of Alabama who adeptly revisits the ugly of race, the power and legacy of familial bonds, the joys and beauty of growing up Southern—our complicated humanity. Say her name: Jacqueline Trimble.”
Randall Horton, author of Pitch Dark Anarchy and Hook
“Jacqueline Trimble waited a long time to publish their first book, but she is right on time. I longed for her kind of poetry, these cut-to-the flesh poems, this verse that sings the old time religion of difficult truths with new courage and utter sister-beauty. And I am so grateful for her gift, her grown-woman poetics.”
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of The Glory Gets
It is cause for celebration that Ms. Trimble is making poetry which is timely and timeless, elegant and brutal, wise and innocent.”
Mark Childress, author of Crazy in Alabama and Georgia Bottoms
“Jacqueline Trimble is fiercely dedicated to turning everyday life into poetry. She is ‘washing off a brown boot/or dozing on a screened porch/or cutting biscuits with a cup/or dreaming of another life/when she stops and takes the knife.’ With the incisive knife of her poetry, she also probes America’s racial divide: ‘Oh, my beloved country, what is to become of us, /Caught as we are in our own imagined terror?’ She is always luminously aware of life’s pleasures and their cost: ‘the sun at her back, the wounded in her wake.”
Andrew Hudgins, author of After the Lost War
WORKS
AMERICAN HAPPINESS is an eclectic collection of poems that addresses everything from the death of parents to racial tension to the encroachment of coyotes into urban spaces. The title is taken from a poem in the last section of the book which considers the kinder, gentler exploits of Sheriff Andy and Deputy Barney during a time when Southern law enforcement officers were reputedly neither kind nor gentle. As the speaker points out, "Deputy Barney had one bullet/and no need for rope/The only burning he did was for his Thelma Lou," a fact that allowed an audience in the midst of racial violence to laugh and "forget/ that outside our own windows/other sheriffs with loaded guns, snarling dogs, and ready hoses/made quick work of a world on fire." The collection explores how happiness in these United States is often dependent upon the stories we create ourselves while we ignore the realities outside our own windows.
"How to Survive as a Black Woman Everywhere in American Including the Deep South"
INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & LINKS
Cave Canem at the New School: Tim Siebles, Sayfia Sinclair, and Jacqueline Allen Trimble
Radio Interview on Empire Today
Poet Jacqueline Trimble Pays Tribute to Her Mother in American Happiness
American Happiness: Humor and Horror
Featured Poet Cave Canem Website
Radio Interview with Patrick Oliver
WORKS
FACTS
Education:
BA, English Huntingdon College
MA and PhD, English,
University of Alabama
Work:
Department Chair, Languages and Literatures, Alabama State University, 2011-present, Associate Professor of English
Department Chair, Languages and Literatures, Huntingdon College, 1999-2010, Professor of English
Recent Awards:
2016 Balcones Poetry Prize
2017 Literary Arts Fellowship, Alabama State Council on the Arts
2017 Teacher and Librarian Scholarship, Key West Literary Seminar
Cave Canem Fellow
Bio
Jacqueline Allen Trimble lives and writes in Montgomery, Alabama, where she is a Professor of English and the chairperson of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University. She holds three degrees in English: the B.A. from Huntingdon College, and the M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Alabama. She is the current board president of the Alabama Writers Forum, and a member of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Museum Board, serving as chairperson of the literary arts award committee for high school and college students. She has won several teaching and writing awards, including the Exemplary Teacher Award (for junior faculty), The Todd Award for Outstanding Teaching (for senior faculty), The Julia Lightfoot Sellers Award (given by the Huntingdon College junior and senior class to the faculty member who has most inspired them to learning), and The
University of Alabama’s Outstanding Dissertation of the Year Award, for Race, Gender Culture in Adrienne Kennedy’s In One Act, an analysis of the playwright Adrienne Kennedy’s absurd dramas through the lens of feminist/womanist theory.
Her research interests include 20th century black women writers, feminist theory, and representations of race and gender in popular culture. She is also a poet. Her work has appeared in The Offing, Blue Lake Review, The Louisville Review and The Griot. American Happiness, her first collection is published by NewSouth Books. The ironically titled book examines America’s refusal to grapple with hard truths, preferring instead the pretense that everyone and everything is just fine. Recently awarded a Key West Literary Seminar scholarship, she is currently a Cave Canem fellow and the recipient of a 2017 literary arts fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts. American Happiness won the 2016 Balcones Poetry Prize and was named best book of 2016 by the new Seven Sisters Book Awards.
News & Events
Contact
For any readings & inquiries, please contact Jacqueline Allen Trimble:
Tel: (334) 625-8767 | jacquelineallentrimble@gmail.com
For books and information regarding this author, you may also contact Suzanne La Rosa at NewSouth Books
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