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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. For recent and upcoming events, click here. 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.
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
ARTS WRITING AND COMMENTARY
TEACHING/CONFERENCES/READINGS/COMMUNITY 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 Portrait photo by Teri Slotkin ; Literary Festival photo-Glenn Nishimura |