|
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. You can also find out more about me at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wi 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, 2007) and Mythologizing Always (Telephone Books, 1981). Of Femme du Monde, Janet Hamill has said "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." Femme du Monde is on Poets & Writers' 2009 Summer Reading List at http://www.pw.org/content/summer_reading_list. 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 , website for the Academy of American Poets. In 2009, she organized and edited: 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 Jason Hwang at the 2009 Vision Festival; during the 1970s and 1980s with Lenora Champagne and Cindy Carr; Carolee Schneemann, and in theater works directed by Bob Holman. In the 2lst century her work is part of 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. This highly popular blog will live on in Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama's First 100 Days, University of Iowa Press, forthcoming in 2010. Recent publications are in the new and established journals: Downtown Brooklyn, The Same, The Southampton Review and the launch of www.KweliJournal.com a new international online literary and arts journal featuring writers and artists of color. The first-ever anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille T. Dungy for University of Georgia Press, which included her work was recently nominated for a NAACP Image Award. Poems are widely anthologized: 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 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 She has taught at Parsons School of Design, New School University; Cave Canem New York Regional Workshops; Naropa University; and Sarah Lawrence College. 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 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. In March 2008, she moderated 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 performed and/or held workshops at a range of venues such asSan Francisco State University's Poetry Center, The California College of Art, 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 |
