Program Director
Danielle Jones is a poet and educator, with over a decade of experience in arts administration and activism. Most recently she worked alongside poet Andrea Cohen as Assistant Director of the Writers House at Merrimack College, where she managed a variety of programming for students interested in creative writing, reading, and thinking, including the poetry slam team and the LitOutLoud literary outreach program. Danielle is a member of the Salem Writers’ Group and the Salem Athenaeum Lit Committee, and has collaborated with the Salem Arts Association, the Boston Book Festival, the Peabody Essex Museum, and many other organizations. She also has a long history with Mass Poetry, beginning as a volunteer while still an MFA candidate at the University of Massachusetts Boston. In the ten years since, she has been involved with the Mass Poetry Festival, Common Threads, Student Day of Poetry, and the Intercollegiate Slam. Danielle has taught writing workshops in classrooms across Massachusetts, as well as in museums, libraries, prisons, senior centers, and on the streets of Salem with “Write Around Town.” Always interested in getting poetry off the page and into the world, she has organized two public art installations: Random Acts of Poetry and the Poetry Dress, which emphasized mentorship and included the work of over seventy female writers.
Danielle’s creative work has appeared in Best New Poets, Consequence Magazine, Memorious, Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award and an Emerging Artist Award from the St. Botolph’s Club Foundation. Danielle just finished her first full-length collection, Landscapes with Alternate Endings, which examines the history of environmental racism, systemic violence, and civil resistance in her hometown of Anniston, Alabama. Danielle now calls Salem home, and loves wandering its woods and graveyards, searching for sea glass, gardening, and gathering with friends and family whenever she can.