When Kima Jones, an independent publicist based in Los Angeles, agreed to help the poet Tyehimba Jess with his publicity campaign for his second collection, “Olio,” she knew it would be a breakout work.
“I was still a baby publicist. I did not have a long list of clients. I didn’t have a long list of contacts,” Jones said. “But I believed in the book from the beginning and what I really believed in was that it was genre-defying poetry.” In 2017, “Olio” won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
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It would be easy to write off the story of “Olio” as a coincidence. In an ideal world there is no causal relationship between publicity and a book’s critical, or even commercial, success. But publicity plays an important and often misunderstood role in how a book and, ultimately, its writer live in the public imagination. And it’s why Jones is determined to use her company, Jack Jones Literary Arts, to change the way writers of color, especially women, and their work are received by the world.
