Samantha Jones : part one

Samantha Jones (she/her) is a scientist, poet, and editor based in Moh’kins’tsis (Calgary) on Treaty 7 territory. She is a magazine and journal enthusiast with writing in THIS, Room, Grain, CV2, Arctic, GeoHumanities, and elsewhere. Her poetry has garnered international attention including the poem, “Ocean Acidification,” which was first published in Watch Your Head, and later featured in the Virtual Ocean Pavilion at COP26. Sam is a PhD Candidate in Geography at the University of Calgary and has a background in geology. Her work also documents her experience living with OCD; her OCD visual poetry chapbook, Site Orientation, is available from the Blasted Tree (2022). Sam is white settler and Black Canadian, and is the founder and facilitator of the Diverse Voices Roundtable for BIPOC Writers at the Alexandra Writers’ Centre Society (Calgary). 

Twitter: @jones_yyc 

https://linktr.ee/JonesYYC 

How did you first engage with poetry?

I first engaged with poetry in childhood through books and stories like Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. I remember creating an illustrated poetry project in elementary school with a classmate. Around the same time, my grandfather was helping at a used bookshop and would bring me there on occasion. He was always interested in poetry and the shelves in his study included leather-bound books with verse by folks like Longfellow. In adulthood, I learned about the diverse expanse of poetry and was drawn in once again, but this time by the styles and stories that spoke to my experiences and ways of navigating the world. I’ve been reading a lot during the pandemic, and in some ways, I feel like the last few years have been my first true immersion in poetry.