Kima Jones is the founder of the Jack Jones Literary Arts, a literary publicity firm.
10 Facts About Kima Jones
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Kima Jones's grandfather was a Southern Baptist minister and her father an imam.
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Kima Jones took an early interest in writing, winning a poetry contest in elementary school to give a reading at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture with children's author Walter Dean Myers.
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The latter, a professor at Marist College, gave her boxes of his extra books; one of these included Mary Helen Washington's collection Black-Eyed Susans and Midnight Birds: Stories by and about Black Women and after reading the anthology cover to cover, Kima Jones turned to the book's index to create another reading list for herself.
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Kima Jones attended Dutchess Community College, then Sarah Lawrence College, though she ultimately left without finishing a degree.
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Kima Jones moved to Los Angeles, California, when she won PEN Center USA Emerging Voices fellowship in 2013.
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Kima Jones has said that her own background as "a queer black girl from Harlem" made the work of women of color like Sandra Cisneros and Toni Morrison especially important to her growing up.
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Kima Jones has been a recipient of the MacDowell, Yaddo and Lambda Literary fellowships.
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Kima Jones contributed the 2014 anthology Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History and to Roxane Gay's 2018 online anthology Unruly Bodies.
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Kima Jones is the 2022 recipient of the Granum Foundation Prize.