Jones, Gayl

novelist, poet, playwright, professor, and literary critic. Born in Lexington, Kentucky, a state that surfaces in much of her work, Gayl Jones has forged an eclectic career, marked by periods of silence, and since the early 1980s, a withdrawal from public existence. Jones began merging academic and creative pursuits early in her life; she was writing stories while in second grade and, as an undergraduate at Connecticut College in 1971, received the college's award for best original poem in 1969 and 1970. Her story “The Roundhouse” also won the Frances Steloff Award for Fiction in 1970. By 1975 she had earned an MA and a DA in creative writing at Brown University and had published Corregidora, her first novel. (Her editor for Corregidora and Eva's Man, the novel that followed it in 1976, was Toni Morrison, then at Random House.) While still a graduate student Jones also published the play Chile Woman (1974) and The Ancestor: A Street Play. From Brown, Jones went on to become an assistant professor of English and Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan. In 1975 she received the Howard Foundation Award, followed first by a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1976, and then by a fellowship from the Michigan Society of Fellows for the years 1977 to 1979.