Poet Joi Publications (PJP) is a for-profit publishing organization based in Los Angeles County. Founded in May 2007, PJP aims to identify emerging voices. Our interest in promoting talented women and other minority writers keeps us at the forefront of the publishing industry. Poet Joi helps writers build and hone skills, facilitates career development, and fosters a creative community of artists. While our publications focus on traditional, contemporary, experimental, and prose poetry, we accept short fiction and multi-genre submissions on a year-round basis. PJP invites all artists to collaborate and communicate through our website as well as at events and reading series.

Committed to community service, PJP sponsors the Emerging Voices Poetry Contest, with an annual reading period from September 1st through June 30th, and $350 in prizes. Moreover, PJP is currently developing a reading series in conjunction with well known publishing organizations in Los Angeles as well as a youth mentorship program for high school students interested in fine and performing arts. Both programs are expected to launch in 2010.

About the Owner & Creative Director 

Jessica Joy Reveles is a Los Angeles based writer, artist, and educator. Her poetic interests lie in exploring human emotion through simplified imagery and common speech. Using a unique combination of experimental line breaks, local images, and accessible language, Reveles uncovers memory while developing immediate and tangible images that connect the reader to the current time and act of remembering.

A longstanding PreK-12 educator in the area of supplemental education services, Reveles continues to work with specialists within and outside her field to develop engaging curricula for use during student workshops. Building on skills such as confidence, goal-setting, communication, and leadership, Reveles leads workshop series designed to help students ranging from middle school to college realize their full potential as they pursue fine arts studies.

Everything is deliberate in my writing, from the specific language employed in a given poem, to line breaks, syntax, punctuation or lack thereof, to overall presentation. Each of these components works toward constructing new memory, new experience through the reader or listener’s engagement with a poem. (© Reveles, 2006)

Like a kaleidoscope shifts colors and shapes as it turns, so too do Reveles’s poems in their progression from broad perspectives to more specific and intimate portrayals of the mundane. 

It has become a necessary process in writing to locate the subtle changes in everyday objects, in ordinary people. Poetry takes shape then, by expressing the extraordinary qualities of those common subjects, whether in celebration or mourning or reflection. This obsession of mine over the simple motions of life - people talking, remembering, struggling - and the language with which to convey those movements, drive artistic creation. (© Reveles, 2006)

With her unconventional style and personal tone, Reveles records her observations of people, specifically Angelinos, using free verse to communicate their stories.

I am invested in experience. Whether nested in the past or rooted in the present, experience is the tool through which writers tell stories. And poems are very short stories. The space of a poem offers a glimpse into what has already been lived by someone or by a group of people. Poems also give meaning to the feelings and ideas conceived in a moment. They are very real things, poems, and very much essential to our understanding of the times, past and present. (© Reveles, 2006)