Patricia Spears Jones
“I always think of myself as evoking the blues in my poetry, and the blues are never ‘happy’ even when they’re ecstatic. There’s a sense of temporality of life. We’re only here for a brief time. There is only so much we can do. People have enemies and there are difficulties. And sometimes there’s great music and great sex to lighten the load.”
“Jones’s poems, written during the past two decades, vibrate with a noticeable hunger and irresistible energy, unashamed to explore the nuances of intimacy via the looming specters of pop culture and history.”
“Poems like stars in a constellation: each glowing point connects in a pattern charting lives full of love and disappointment, injustice and defeat, joy and resilience.”
“Hers is a poetics of dialogue, and her poems are in deep conversation with a dizzying array of other thinkers and artists, including Catullus, Billie Holiday, Rufino Tamayo, Pablo Neruda, Etta James, Sylvia Plath, Aretha Franklin, Jorge Luis Borges, Toni Morrison, Mary J. Blige, Kara Walker, Fats Domino, Kurt Cobain, and Jacques Derrida. She is engaged with painting, music, fashion, film, and theater in America and beyond its shores. Patricia Spears Jones’ poems are made of fever, bones, and breath. The fever of eros, the bones of family and friends, and the breath of everyday existence.”
“The past and the present collide as Jones (Painkiller) delivers a sumptuous exploration of race, class, sex, love, and history filtered through the tumultuous backdrop of American idealism...Jones’s poems, written during the past two decades, vibrate with a noticeable hunger and irresistible energy, unashamed to explore the nuances of intimacy via the looming specters of pop culture and history.”
Patricia Spears Jones is a poet, playwright, anthologist, educator, and cultural activist. She is the winner of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers and is the 2023 New York State Poet Laureate.n Her most recent book is The Beloved Community (Copper Canyon, 2023). She is also the author of A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems. Her work is anthologized in African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song; Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin; and BAX 2016: Best American Experimental Writing. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Brooklyn Rail, The Ocean State Review, Ms., and Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts. Patricia Spears Jones edited THINK: Poems for Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Day Hat and Ordinary Women: An Anthology of New York City Women. Mabou Mines commissioned and produced her plays Mother and Song for New York: What Women Do While Men Sit Knitting. Patricia Spears Jones co-curated the Wednesday Night Series for St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project.
She has taught graduate and undergraduate creative writing at Hollins University, Adelphi University, Hunter College, and Barnard College. She leads poetry workshops for the 92nd Street Y, The Workroom, Hugo House, Community of Writers, Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, Gemini Ink, and Brooklyn Poets. She organizes the American Poets Congress and is a Senior Fellow Emeritus of the Black Earth Institute. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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