Chris Jones : part one

Chris Jones has lived in Sheffield, England since 1990. He was awarded an Eric Gregory Award (a national prize for poets under the age of 30) in 1996. From 1997 to 1999 he worked as a writer-in-residence at Nottingham Prison. He was the Literature Officer for Leicestershire for five years and then spent some time as a freelance writer and poetry festival organiser. He currently teaches creative writing at Sheffield Hallam University. His poetry collections include The Safe House (Shoestring Press, 2007), Skin (Longbarrow Press, 2015) and most recently Little Piece of Harm (Longbarrow Press, 2021).

His website is: http://www.chris-jones.org.uk/

What are you working on?

I’ve just completed a long narrative sequence of poetry entitled Little Piece of Harm, published by Longbarrow Press.  It took me five years to write: the text is under forty pages long. I say this partly to show how slowly I work.  I’ve had other collaborations and commissions since my last publication in 2016, but this has been the main focus of my efforts.  Fourteen poems. It is as much or as little as I want to express at this moment in my life and I am very happy with the finished collection. I always find, post-publication, it’s a bit like being caught in the wake of an ocean-going liner. Nothing is settled: lots of ups and downs.  You feel strong movement but you’re not sure you’re going anywhere. However, I am writing short, compact, stand-alone pieces currently, as much to exercise my writing muscles as anything else, before I commit to another extended sequence. I want to develop a set of poems about the American artist/photographer/journalist Lee Miller, but having announced this publicly here, with nothing to show for it, this might turn out to be the kiss of death for my nascent project!