Patricia Spears Jones is a poet, writer, playwright, cultural critic, and winner of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers. She is author of A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems (White Pine Press, 2015) which was Finalist for the PSA’s William Carlos Williams Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize, and a featured Pushcart Prize winning poem. She has 10 additional publications: poetry books, chapbooks and in anthologies such as Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin; BAX: Best American Experimental Writing, 2016: 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI, Best of Small Presses; Truth to Power: Writers Respond to The Rhetoric of Hate and Fear; and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry.
She has received grants and awards from NYSCA, NEA, the Foundation for Contemporary Art, and the BAU Institute for residency at Camargo Foundation in France. She has been a fellow at Robert Rauschenberg Residency and at VCCA, Yaddo, and the Millay Colony. She is also a recipient of a Goethe Institute grant for travel in Germany. She will teach at Barnard College, Spring 2019 and has taught at CUNY College, including Hunter College and Queens College, and has taught at Adelphi University. She has been on faculty for summer programs at Fine Arts Work Center, Community of Writers, Naropa University and University of Rhode Island. She has led workshops at Poets House, the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, and she curated WORDS SUNDAY at Calabar Imports featuring Brooklyn-based poets including Nicole Peyrafitte, Gregory Pardlo, Alexis DeVeaux, Nicole Hefner Callihan, Terence Degnan, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Janice Lowe, Tai Allen and Michael Broder. She is a Black Earth Institute senior fellow emeritus and organizer of American Poets Congress. www.psjones.com