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 working with Mabou Mines, the internationally acclaimed theater collective and as a poet, teacher and former Program Coordinator for the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. 

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) and The Poetry Project Newsletter (Greg Fuchs).   "Jim" from this volume is up on  http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19178 at the Academy of American Poets website.

She is co-editor of 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" was published in The Brooklyn Rail, www.brooklynrail.org/2007/10/poetry/the-brooklyn-song. 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.

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at the 2007 Arkansas Literary Festival

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. Print and electronic journal  publications include http://jacketmagazine.com/32/holiday-album.shtm ed. by Elaine Equi; Columbia Poetry Review #21;  http://www.naropa.edu/notenoughnight/;  PMS #8, guest ed. Honoree Jeffers, 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, Barrow Street, 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.

ARTS WRITING AND COMMENTARY
She has written articles, texts, interviews, and reviews on literature, theater, the visual arts, film and music in Essence, The Brooklyn Rail, Black Issues Book Review, Bomb, Quarterly Black Review, Heresies, and The Poetry Project Newsletter and 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 tracts and 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.  In 2006, she produced a journal for The Poetry Foundation's online site: www.poetryfoundation.org.

CRITICAL ATTENTION
Her first collection, The Weather That Kills reviewed 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. While her poetry received brief commentary in Performing the Word: African American Poetry as Vernacular Culture by Fahamisha Patricia Brown, it was more extensively examined in Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry by Lorenzo Thomas. 

TEACHING/CONFERENCES/READINGS/COMMUNITY
At the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church, she taught a  workshop"Basic and Bold" for practicing writers and she will be a visiting writer 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 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 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 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 also received scholarships for residencies at 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