Category Archives: Readings & Performances
Readings and events schedules for Patricia Spears Jones
Poetry Project’s 50th Annual NYE Marathon
The poet Kay Gabriel adjusted the mic for Patricia Spears Jones at The Poetry Project’s NYE Marathon.
On the morning of New Year’s Day, along the sleepy streets of the East Village in Manhattan, scarf-bundled crowds trickled into St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery to attend a 12-hour poetry reading that has been a spiritually cleansing downtown tradition since the 1970s. To its devotees, the gathering’s hypnotically lengthy programming of readings and avant-garde performances provides a dependably radical initiation into the new year.
Hosted by the Poetry Project, the nonprofit organization that has operated out of the historic church since the 1960s, the marathon serves as its biggest annual fund-raiser. About 150 writers, artists and dancers take their turns onstage until about midnight. Its performers have included William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Yoko Ono, Amiri Baraka and Patti Smith. Years ago, the poet John Giorno might have provided participants with a bowl of LSD-spiked punch; these days, young attendees head to the church directly after partying at all-night raves.
Sunlight poured through stained-glass windows as guests settled in for the long haul ahead. Beneath the church’s paint-peeling ceiling, many sat cross-legged in nooks and corners, unpacking the blankets and dog-eared paperbacks they had brought with them. A few parents wearing beanies sat in chairs with their babies in tow, and a woman walked her terrier down a crowded aisle.
Book Launch for Patricia Spears Jones’s The Beloved Community
Book Launch for Patricia Spears Jones’s The Beloved Community
Patricia Spears Jones works truly toward her title in poems and friendship — in her newest work, The Beloved Community, she imagines a horizon of dignity and care, and writes with clear-eyed candor of the incremental effort required. Change accrues over daily moments of effort and attention, with poems of rich, lyrical regard.
Featuring a reading from Patricia Spears Jones with music performances from Jason Kao Hwang, Janice Lowe, and Luke Stewart.
We hope you can join us for a pre-event reception at 7 pm!
This in-person event will also be livestreamed via The Poetry Project’s YouTube.
NYS Poet aka PSJ
PSJ: Winner of Jackson Prize and Appointed New York State Poet (2023-2025)
The New York State Writers Institute has announced Jacqueline Woodson has been named the new State Author and Patricia Spears Jones the new State Poet.The citations, established in 1985 by Governor Mario M. Cuomo and the State Legislature to promote fiction and poetry in New York, are awarded biennially under the aegis of the New York State Writers Institute. Awardees serve for two years in their honorary positions and each receives a $10,000 honorarium.
Woodson will receive the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction and Jones will receive the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit for Poetry at a ceremony hosted by University at Albany President Havidán Rodríguez to take place at 7:30 pm on Friday, September 22, 2023, at the University at Albany’s Campus Center West Auditorium.
The NYS Author and NYS Poet ceremony serves as the official kickoff event for the 6th Annual Albany Book Festival presented by the NYS Writers Institute. That event takes place from 10:30 a.m. through 4:15 p.m. Saturday, September 23, 2023, where Woodson and Jones will appear at an informal conversation at 10:30 am and take questions from the audience in the Campus Center West Auditorium.
These events are free and open to the public and will be held at UAlbany’s Uptown Campus, 1400 Washington Avenue. More information can bee found at albanybookfestival.com.
New Yorks Laureates
The awardees are chosen by panels of jurors, including students, convened by the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany.
Both laureates came originally from the American South before putting down deep and lasting roots in New York City. Jacqueline Woodson, one of the most beloved children’s authors of her generation, moved to Brooklyn from Greenville, South Carolina at the age of seven. Patricia Spears Jones, born and raised in Arkansas, came to New York in the 1970s and quickly became a key figure in the poetry community.
Jacqueline Woodson‘s memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, won the 2014 National Book Award and was a New York Times bestseller. Her novel, Another Brooklyn, was a National Book Award finalist and an Indie Pick in 2016.
Patricia Spears Jones is a Brooklyn-based poet and the author of five collections, including The Beloved Community (2023) and A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems (2015). Her work has been anthologized in African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She is also the co-editor of the groundbreaking 1978 anthology, Ordinary Women: An Anthology of New York City Women Poets.
PSJ Installation Ceremony
Join us for our Albany Book Festival kickoff event: the installation ceremony for our new NYS Author Ayad Akhtar and NYS Poet Willie Perdomo.
Akhtar will receive the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction and Perdomo will receive the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit for Poetry at a special ceremony to be held 7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 24, at the University at Albany’s Campus Center West Auditorium.
The NYS Author and NYS Poet ceremony serves as the official kickoff event for the 4th Annual Albany Book Festival hosted by the NYS Writers Institute — 10:30 a.m. through 5 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 25.
Both events are free are open to the public and will be held at UAlbany’s Uptown Campus, 1400 Washington Avenue.
“These two outstanding writers with New York roots are worthy recipients of these prestigious honors. We celebrate their singular literary excellence and how each embodies the vitality of literary art in New York State.”
The world (whirls) are spinning April 2022
This morning a Black man in some sort of uniform wearing a gas mask pulled out a canister that temporary blinded people and then shot those within a subway car going into the 36th Street Station in Brooklyn.
The sun is bright this day. The air is crisp.
My neighbors and my landlord are doing repairs on buildings up and down Macon Street. The planet is spinning–there is so much rage. War in the West. War in the East. War on almost every continent on our globe. Wars in ourselves.
So how best to remember that like my neighbors hammering, good and useful things happen at the same time as catastrophes. Here’s a brief riposte.
So it is good to just say that I am grateful for all who celebrated with me this past Friday, April 8 when I was honored by The Poetry Project at its gala celebrating the Project’s 55th year–the other honoree was Rene Ricard who departed in 2014 after an often tumultuous but poetry driven life. Vincent Katz and Arden Wohl were the Gala’s co-chairs and Kyle Dacuyan, the Project’s ED set a generous and convivial tone to the evening. Here are a few notes from my part as honoree:
Jason Kao Hwang played a beautiful violin solo and it was definitely my part of the program. Lorraine O’Grady was filmed talking about my work in A Lucent Fire, and she read “The Perfect Lipstick”‘ a 3 minute reel about me included Cornelius Eady, Alice Notley, Maureen Owen, Guillermo F. Castro, and Charlotte Carter; and then Tyehimba Jess basically testified on my behalf and read “Love Come and Go”.It took just about everything in me to not cry. And then it was me and yes, i was on point. I found a poem I wrote back in 1974-75 as a way to show just how long I’ve been associated with the Project and then spoke about the importance of the Project and I ended the speech by reading “Seraphim” with the last line “And unto joy” which seems utterly apt. We see such horror, terror, rage, and we write about them-if there is one thing we can try and do as artists and writers and humans on this planet is remind ourselves that joy abides as well.
I am thankful to have friends and family who encourage me. I know that readers when they find my books are pleased to have done so. Over the past 10 years, there has been a growing look at my work and greater interest. I have lived long enough to gather some applause. I know that this is not always the case. Good friends joined me at Table 5: Willie Perdomo, Charlotte Carter and Marie Brown–Black and Brown literati. We are here and we are working and know the world is spinning, but writers are always about dancing on the whirls.
new season new reason to learn new things. aka AUTUMN in New York
FAWC BROCHURE
Today is the first full day of autumn in New York and I am humming Vernon Duke’s tune with Sarah Vaugh’s lush voice in my mind’s ear. It is also John Coltrane, Ray Charles, Louise Nevelson’s paradisal birthday. While I believe that Trane is in heaven, where those delicious sinner, Charles and Nevelson–well who knows? I have been printing and re–reading poems to start off the first asynchroous workshops I’ve ever offered. I hope I do it well. I love teaching poetry workshops, mostly for the dialogue within the classes. I love working with fellow writers–knowledgeable and passionate and open to trying new things. And for whatver reason my workshops work for poets–new poems emerge or old ones get refurbished. And many new books start or morph in my workshops: Renato Rosaldo, Jordan Franklin, Metta Sama, Meghan Dunn are a few of my former “students” with books out or that are coming out. But the best thing is that poets write new poems. So I hope I get a good crew for the 9 Living Women Poets workshop. https://fawc.org/24-pearl-street-program/
********I will also be teaching for the 92nd Street Y. I’ve taken classes and I know how rigorous and vigorous they can be. DEADLINE SEPTEMBER 24. Guidelines and Info at https://www.92y.org/class/adv-poetry-with-patricia-spears-jones
Yes it is autumn in new york-and it feels like “home” 
Summer zooms along.
Vision Fest salute to Amina Claudine Myers
I am so pleased to have performed on the night of performances and tributes to the amazing musician and composer, Amina Claudine Myers. Amina has been making important music for 4 decades–piano works, works for the organ and choral music. On July 23, her artistry was on full display at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, in Brooklyn. The Vision Festival 25th year was a powerful and poignant one–it included an elegaic program for the now late Milfred Graves. But the second night belong to Amina, glorious singers, and yours truly, the poet. Amina and I grew up in Arkansas–so it felt very homegirl. Plus Amina’s relatives flew to NYC for this honor. There are many women making music in jazz and improvisational music, but there aren’t as many as there should be, just saying Amina was one of the few women musicians accepted into the AACM back in the day and she’s done much to make the scene more inclusive. Progress is often too damn slow. But progress has been made. I was glad to be up in front of the audience and Jason Hwang, with whom I’ve done several programs was there too. Amina received great applause, many bouquets and the adoration of her fans.
Teaching from home
This has been a busy summer of readings, workshops ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM: Gemini Ink, HWVC, Hurston-Wright ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM so reading before actual human beings in a large, fairly open space–Pioneer Works is huge was a mixed blessing. And with the Delta variant & whatever other mutating viruses arrive, I see ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM in the near and possibly far future.
Whatever and however we can, we must continue to make ceremony. We must celebrate the creativity and staying power of artists, elders and younger ones. We must work hard to be as good as we can be because so much that surrounds us is nasty, violent, evil (see Texas Republicans as an example). Summer with its heat, rains, hurricanes, tornadoes is almost gone. And I must say I am pleased to be at The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts with a fully funded Richard S. and Julia Louise Reynolds Poetry Fellowship. First week here I read with a wonderful prose writer–we really had a blast.
What can we do to keep going to doing bad times, we do our work and with style. Caitlyn Myer and I did at VCCA.
Caitlyn and I read poetry and prose at VCCA
Another chance to sing a Black Girl’s Song
Mariposa Fernandez and her colleagues at Lehman College reached out to me to join her and Latasha N. Diggs in one more reading from African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song. The anthology, edited by Kevin Young has become an instant classic(wow). I am honored to be a contributor and I was honored to perform in this reading. We were able to get two fabulous ASL interpreters so that the hearing impaired were able to join in.
Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SH4IThHMIc&list=PLB4i8n78Nlt8zkw-7GlQP47CX2LdWBQ4W&index=3
Autumn in New York
It is Moon Festival Day several Chinese friends tell me. The Jewish High Holy Days have come and gone. The toxic president continues to spew is bile. The weather is stunningly beautiful. Yes, it is Autumn in New York. Soon everyone will show photos of their walks with brightly colored trees. Or they will show photos of fleeing fires. Or putting on snow tires. Oh oh oh the weather in America, in the Northern Hemispheres is now framed, flooded, and flamed by climate change.
As a poet I do what I can to find as many ways as possible to not feel so isolated, anxious, depressed as the weather demands pure love. On September 11, 2001 the weather was sparkling. I do not trust sparkling weather anymore. But it is beautiful.
As a poet, I am organizes workshops, writing post cards to get out the vote, organizing fundraisers for Democrats and curating programs. Here’s one that helped me with my anxiety depression and isolation. I thank The Brooklyn Rail for the opportunity to curate and present these amazing poets. oh and VOTE