Patricia Spears Jones

Patricia Spears Jones is a poet, educator, cultural activist, anthologist and recipient of 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize and is author of A Lucent Fire New and Selected Poems and three full-length collections and five chapbooks. She co-edited the groundbreaking anthology, Ordinary Women: An Anthology of New York City Women (1978) and THINK: Poems for Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Day Hat (2009). Her poems are widely anthologized most notably in Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin: BAX: Best American Experimental Writing, 2016 and WORD: An Anthology by A Gathering of Tribes and Lift Every Voice: Why African American Poetry Matters Today, and in The New Yorker, www.darkmatterwomenwitnessing.com and The Brooklyn Rail. Essays, colloquies and interviews are published in Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry; The Whiskey of Our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience and Change Agent; and print and online journals including The Black Scholar, Bomb, for Harriet at The Poetry Foundation, www.tribes.org; The Poetry Project Newsletter, Rumpus and The Writers Chronicle. The Museum of Modern Art commissioned the poem “Lave” for the exhibition, Jacob Lawrence: The Migrations Series. She has taught Creative Writing at Hunter College, Barnard College, Adelphi University and Hollins University as the 2020 Louis D. Rubin Writer in Residence. She is Emeritus Fellow for Black Earth Institute and organizer of the American Poets Congress.