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Jill Jones was born in Sydney where she still lives. Her work has been widely published in most of the leading literary periodicals in Australia as well as in a number of print and online magazines in New Zealand, Canada, the USA, Britain, Italy and India. She has worked in a number of different fields over the years: legal publishing, journalism, government information, public policy and arts administration and has also worked freelance as a writer and editor.
Jones came relatively late to writing and publishing poetry, her poetry publishing career beginning in the late 1980s.
In the late 1980s she co-founded, with Laurin McKinnon, the gay and lesbian publishing venture, BlackWattle Press which published a literary magazine, cargo. After a couple of years Jones ceased her formal involvement with the press to pursue her own writing while McKinnon went on to publish a ground-breaking series of books by gay and lesbian writers.
She was also a member of the collective producing Refractory Girl, at that stage Australia’s longest running feminist magazine.
Her first book, The Mask and the Jagged Star, was published by New Zealand publisher, Hazard Press, as part of a short-lived trans-Tasman series of books, jointly edited by Philip Mead (Australia) and Rob Jackaman (NZ). The book was well-received in both Australia and New Zealand, and in 1993 won the Mary Gilmore Award for a first book of poetry.
A second book, Flagging Down Time, was published in late 1993 by Five Islands Press.
Jones was frequently published in Australian and international journals during the early and mid-1990s. She was also involved in a number of writing groups during these years including the NSW Poets’ Union, the No Regrets women writers’ group, and the Round Table writers’ group. She co-edited with Judith Beveridge and Louise Wakeling, A Parachute of Blue, an anthology of current Australian poetry for Round Table Publications and published in1995. She also received of two Australia Council writers grants, in 1992 and 1994.
In 1995, with Martin Langford and Rosemary Huisman, she convened of “The Whole Voice”, the second national conference on poetry, held at the University of Sydney. Sessions from the conference were later broadcast on the ABC and she and her fellow convenors were guest editors of an issue of Southerly in which proceedings from this conference were published.
She served as a judge for the 1995 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and was a member of the Sydney Writers Festival committee in 1996. She was also a featured reader at a number of festivals including the Montsalvat Poetry Festival 1993, the NSW Regional Poetry Festival, Wollongong 1993, the Space of Poetry Conference 1993, Melbourne University, and the Sydney Writers’ Festival 1997.
During this period she worked as a journalist, columnist and regular reviewer of books, theatre and music for the Sydney Star Observer and also wrote book reviews for a number of other Australian publications including the Australian Book Review, Southerly, Ulitarra, Island, the Australian Women’s Book Review and Five Bells.
Her third book, The Book of Possibilities (Hale & Iremonger), was published in 1997. It was shortlisted for the National Book Council ‘Banjo’ Awards, The Age Poetry Book of the Year award, and the Adelaide Festival Awards.
Due to a range of circumstances, she published little poetry during the late 1990s and withdrew somewhat from the Australian poetry scene. During this time she began writing a novel (currently unpublished). However, she served as a member of the Literary Sub-Committee for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival, 1998-1999.
Around 2000 she became involved with various online poetry communities, based variously in Australia, the USA and the UK, which reinvigorated her writing. She began publishing in a number of on-line journals based in the USA and the UK and also became involved in a number of collaborative writing projects, both on and off-line. During this period she was also film reviewer for the Sydney Star Observer.
In 2003 she joined in with an ongoing series of collaborations and public performances organised by the DiVerse group of poets, responding to art works and exhibits. Events were hosted by the Art Gallery of NSW, the Sydney Observatory, the Powerhouse Museum, the S.H. Ervin Gallery and NSW Police and Justice Museum and the National Gallery in Canberra.
She was also invited by poet James Stuart to take part in the inaugural c-side events, involving collaborative written word/ still image “slideshows” by poets and photographers accompanied by DJs mixing a live soundtrack. The first c-side took place at the This Is Not Art Festival, Newcastle, in October 2003 and later reprised at the Live Bait Festival at the Bondi Pavilion in January 2004. Jones collaborated with photographer <a href=http:/ / www.annettewillis.com/ >Annette Willis</ a> on an image and text work called “Hidden Shrines”. She re-worked “Hidden Shrines”, which was subsequently shown as part of a exhibition of staff work in the foyer of the Australia Council for the Arts in 2005 and, with a newly developed soundtrack, for a special presentation for the Melbourne Poets Union, also in 2005.
She continues to work with Annette Willis on other collaborative and multi-media projects including, most recently, Sea Shadow Land Light, first presented at On The Beach, a conference presented by Edith Cowan University at Fremantle in February 2004, and The Romance of Death, an exhibition held in Sydney in 2005.
She was a member of the judging panel for the 2001 Broadway Poetry Prize and, in 2002, for the Roland Robinson Poetry Prize. In 2001 and 2003, with poet and visual artist Ruark Lewis, she organised Sydney readings for a world-wide series of readings under the aegis of the United Nations Dialogue Through Poetry.
Her fourth book, Screens, Jets, Heaven: New and Selected Poems, was published by Salt Publishing 2002. It won the 2003 Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize (NSW Premier’s Literary Awards).
She has been a regular participant in the Sydney Poetry Seminars convened by Peter Minter for the Sydney Poetry Network in 2003, 2004 and 2005 and was invited to speak at a panel on ‘Poetry: Emotions, Ethics, Aesthetics’ with Laurie Duggan and Jennifer Strauss plus a paper by Michael Brennan presented in absentia at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) conference, University of Sydney, in 2005.
With Michael Farrell, she co-edited a selection of Australian poetry on sex for an edition of Slope magazine in 2003.
For a month in 2003 Jones and Brisbane-based artist and poet, Angela Gardner, exchanged poetry by postcard between Australia and the UK. Gardner subsequently made an artist’s book recording this collaboration, consisting of scanned and digitally manipulated versions of ten of these postcards. The original book is lodged with the Fryer Library in Brisbane.
In 2004 she released two chap books: Struggle and Radiance: Ten Commentaries, was published in Ireland by Wild Honey Press in mid-2004 and Where the Sea Burns, in the Wagtail series was issued by Picaro Press in late 2004. ABC National radio program Poetica broadcasted a half hour interview and reading of her work on 14 December 2004.
Her fifth full-length book, Broken/ Open, was published by Salt Publishing in 2005. It was launched at the 2005 Sydney Writers Festival and subsequently shortlisted for The Age Poetry Book of the Year 2005.
Jill Jones also keeps a weblog at Ruby Street and a website.
http://april.edu.au/jones-jill/bio.shtml