Born and raised in Arkansas, PATRICIA SPEARS JONES aka Patricia Jones has lived in New York City since the mid-1970s where she has been involved in the city's poetry and theater scenes as poet, editor, anthologist, teacher and former Program Coordinator for the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and working with Mabou Mines, the internationally acclaimed theater collective.

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BOOKS, POETRY, THEATER, COLLABORATIONS

Spears Jones is author of two collections: The Weather That Kills  published by Coffee House Press (1995)  and Femme du Monde  from Tia Chucha Press (2006)  and two chapbooks:  Repuestas! Belladonna Books (2007) and Mythologizing Always, Telephone Books (1981) both now out of print. Of  Femme du Monde, Janet Hamill wrote: "I was thoroughly seduced by Femme du Monde, by the grit and blood, wit, flesh, bone, and spirit of which the poems are made. From the particular they move to the universal, effortlessly. From the body they dissolve into space. The world they reference is mundane. The world they reference is marvelous. The senses perceive, the poet distills, and life is reduced to a healing elixir." Other positive reviews for Femme du Monde can be found in Black Issues Book Review (Tara Betts), Barrow Street (Scott Hightower), Small Press Review (Thad Rutkowski), The Poetry Project Newsletter (Greg Fuchs) and at www.tribes.org (Soraya Shalforoosh).   "Jim" from this volume is up on  http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19178 at the Academy of American Poets website.

She is editor of Think: Poems for Aretha Franklin's Inauguration Day Hat at http://bombsite.powweb.com/?p=2944. She co-edited the ground-breaking, multi-cultural anthology, Ordinary Women: Poems by New York City Women with Fay Chiang, Sandra Maria Esteves and Sara Miles from 1978.  Her play ‘Mother’ was commissioned and produced by Mabou Mines in 1994 with music by Carter Burwell.  A second collaboration with Mabou Mines entitled Song for New York: What Women Do When Men Sit Knitting with composer Lisa Gutkin and four other poets was performed in New York from Aug. 31-Sep. 9, 2007.  See www.maboumines.org.  "The Brooklyn Song" is on The Brooklyn Rail, www.brooklynrail.org/2007/10/poetry/the-brooklyn-song and as part of the Planetary Stories on the Black Earth Institute website, www.blackearthinstitute.org.  Other collaborations included performances with Lenora Champagne and Carolee Schneemann, and in theater works directed by Bob Holman and on www.sandrapayne.com, a web page of award winning African American artist, Sandra Payne.

at the 2007 Arkansas Literary Festival

In addition to contributions to Think; she participated in 100 Days/100 Poems at http://100dayspoems.blogspot.com.  The 100 Days poems will be published by University of Iowa press. New poems are in the following literary journals: The Same, The Southampton Review and Stretching Panties and will be featured in the inaugural issue of Kweli Journal, a new international online literary and arts journal focused on writers and artists of color.

Her poems are anthologized in broken land: Poems of Brooklyn; Bowery Women: Poems; Jazz Poems; Poetry After 911; bum rush-the page, a defpoetry jam; Best American Poetry, 2000; Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, The Woman That I Am: The Literature and Culture of Contemporary Women of Color' and Black Sister.  Fifth Wednesday nominated "Beuys and the Blonde" for a Pushcart Prize.  

2008 was an active year for both print and electronic journal  publications including featured work in The Oxford American, Southern Music Issue #10; Barrow Street 10th Anniversary issue;   http://jacketmagazine.com/32/holiday-album.shtm ed. by Elaine Equi; Columbia Poetry Review #21;  The Black Scholar;  http://www.naropa.edu/notenoughnight/;  PMS #8, guest  ed.by Honoree Jeffers,  Court Green (the Sylvia Plath Dossier). Other journal publications include: Bomb, Black Renaissance Noire, TriQuarterly, Rattapallax 12, nocturnes 3, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Court Green, Warpland, www.mipoesias.com; 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Telephone, Agni, Callaloo, Hanging Loose, The American Voice,  IKON, Ploughshares, www.poetz.com, The World, The Recluse #3,and Crazy Horse.   "All Saints Day"  was translated into Czech by poet, translator and musician, Pavla Jonssonova.

CRITICAL ATTENTION
In addition to the critical acclaim for Femme du Monde,  her first collection, The Weather That Kills r also received outstanding reviews by David Henderson in the Poetry Project Newsletter; David Mills in Quarterly Black Review and William Allen in Chelsea.  Jennifer Berman interviewed her for BOMB Magazine, Summer 1995 issue. Her poetry is receiving critical commentary in a variety of places including Transcultural Graffitti and the Teaching of Literacy by Russell West-Pavlov, a professor of English at the Free University of Berlin ; brief commentary in Performing the Word: African American Poetry as Vernacular Culture by Fahamisha Patricia Brown and an extensive examination in Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry by Lorenzo Thomas.  2008 found positive reviews of publications in newpages.com and thisimpress regarding poems in The Oxford-American, http://tinycatpants.wordpress.com/2008/12/19/the-true-treat-of-the-new-oa.

ARTS WRITING AND COMMENTARY
She started 2009 with a review of Toni Morrison's novel, A Mercy  for Tribes at  http://www.tribes.org/web/2009/01/01/review-of-toni-morrisons-a-mercy/  and an excerpt from her email blasts is in PEN AMERICA: Issue #10: Fear Itself.   Other articles, texts, interviews, and reviews on literature, theater, the visual arts, film and music  on African American and women's cultural contributions are in Essence, The Brooklyn Rail, Black Issues Book Review, Bomb, Quarterly Black Review, Heresies, and The Poetry Project Newsletter.  She writes a regular column, "Cosmopolitan in Brooklyn" for Calabar Magazine.  She is co-editor of the groundbreaking anthology, Ordinary Women: An Anthology of New York City Women and a Contributing Editor of Bomb Magazine and  Heliotrope.  Her pedagogical essay, “Experience, Experiment: Using Black Poetry in Creative Writing Classes” is anthologized in Sing the Sun Up: Creative Writing Ideas from African American Literature edited by Lorenzo Thomas.  She has also written catalogue essays on the following visual artists: Richard E.Powell, Jane Dickson, Rhonda Schaller, William Allen and Barbara Westermann.  She interviewed the African American artist, Lorenzo Pace, for a BOMBlive event which was aired on WPS1,  and clips from the interview are at http://www.bombsite.com/issues/0/articles/3009 and up on YouTube.  In 2006, she produced a journal (now archived) for The Poetry Foundation's online site: www.poetryfoundation.org.

TEACHING/CONFERENCES/READINGS/COMMUNITY
In 2009, she was asked to host a series of conversations between leading authors of the African Diaspora including Ishmael Reed, Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove, Junot Diaz and Victor Hernandez Cruz and Ntozake Shange at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.  She also participated in the Writers on Writing Program at Long Island University.

 At the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church, she taught a  workshop" Basic and Bold" for practicing writers and at the Solstice Creative Writing Conference at Pine Manor College, www.pmc.edu in June 2008. In March 2008, she served as moderator for a poetry panel at the 9th National Black Writers Conference at Medgar Evers College, see www.mec.cuny.edu/blacklitcenter.  She participated in the Yari Yari and Yari Yari Pambieri conferences at  NYU and moderated the panel, “Art as a Weapon” at Medgar Evers College in 2004. 

She has taught at Parsons School of Design, New School University; Cave Canem New York Regional Workshops; Naropa University; and Sarah Lawrence College. In 2008, she was appointed as a Fellow to the Black Earth Institute, a progressive "think tank of artists, scholars and activists, www.blackearthinstitute.org  and was elected as a Fellow to Council for the Virginia Center for Creative Arts in 2007. She has served as a juror for three NYFA Poetry Fellowship panels; for the 2002 Poetry in Translation Prize from P.E.N. American Center; and as a panelist for the Literature Program of the  New York State Council on the Arts.

She has performed and/or held workshops at a range of venues such as The Arkansas Literary Festival, Barnes & Noble at Astor Place, Lesley University, Columbia College in Chicago, Chicago State University, Woodland Pattern, Fordham University, Poets Out Loud series; University Rhode Island Read/Write series; Bread Loaf, Hollins University, Rhodes College, Intersection, Just Buffalo, St. Mark’s Poetry Project, Poets House, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Nuyorican Poets Café, the Bowery Poetry Club, McNally Robinson Bookstore, the University of Kansas at Lawrence, the Center for Book Arts, the Envision Festival at Bard College, University of Rhode Island, and the Studio Museum of Harlem.

GRANTS AND PRIZES
She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Goethe Institute for travel and research in Germany.  Agni. selected “Sapphire” as an honorable mention for the Anne Sexton Poetry Prize in 2000. She has received fellowships to Yaddo, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Portrait photo by Teri Slotkin ; Literary Festival photo-Glenn Nishimura