WINNER JACKSON POETRY PRIZE
photo credit, Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Arkansas born and raised; resident of New York City for more than four decades, Patricia Spears Jones is the recipient of The Jackson Poetry Prize, one the most prestigious awards for American Poets via Poets & Writers, Inc. The $50,000 prize is among the most substantial given to an American poet and is designed to provide what all poets need: time and encouragement to write. She is the eleventh winner. Here is the information with the citation: https://www.pw.org/about-us/news-releases/patricia_spears_jones_wins_50000_jackson_poetry_prize.
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Spears Jones was named in Essence.com as one of its “40 Poets They Love” in 2010. In 2018, her poem “Seraphim” is listed in The New Yorker‘s Year in Poems https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2018-in-review/our-year-in-poems. She is author of the poetry collections: Painkiller and Femme du Monde from Tia Chucha Press and The Weather That Kills from Coffee House Press and five chapbooks including Living in the Love Economy. Her fourth collection: A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems from White Pine Press (White Pine Press Distinguished Poets series) which features her 2017 Pushcart Prize winning poem, “Etta James at the Audubon Ballroom.” She was a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Prize from the Poetry Society of America and the Paterson Prize from Passaic County Community College, which was won by her Vermont College MFA advisor, Mark Doty. Her work is widely anthologized. She is a recipient of grants and awards from the NEA, NYFA, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Award in 2015. She has been a fellow at Virginia Center for Creative Arts (VCCA), Yaddo, the Millay Colony and in 2018 was granted a Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, FL and an international residency via The Bau Institute at Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France.
She is the editor of “The Future Differently Imagined”, an issue of About Place Journal, the online publication of Black Earth Institute and was editor and contributor to the blog project: Thirty Days Hath September: Another Kind of Noise (www.blackearthinstitute.org) (2012) and a 2016 version; Think: Poems for Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Day Hat (www.bombsite.org ) (2009) and co-editor of the long out of print, ground-breaking anthology Ordinary Women: An Anthology of Poetry by New York City Women (1978). She also published W.B.#1 a mimeo magazine which included works by Lee Breuer, Robin Messing, Larry Eigner, Bill Kushner, Levi Frazier, Jr. and Ted Greenwald in 1975.
Spears Jones has been a culture maven for four decades. She was the first African American programmer as Program Coordinator at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church where two decades later she served as Mentor for Emerge, Surface, Be, a new fellowship program. She ran the esteemed New Works Program for the Massachusetts Council of Arts and Humanities (1989-1991) and was Director of Planning and Development at The New Museum of Contemporary Art (1994-96). She is also actively involved in a variety of formal and informal organizations involved with progressive politics, social justice, feminism, the environment, and multi-culturalism, best seen in her appointment as Senior Fellow for The Black Earth Institute. She curates WORDS SUNDAY, a literary and performance series focused on Brooklyn based writers and artists. She has taught at CUNY and Adelphi University.
She served on the boards of Mabou Mines, the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and Artsgarden l0cated in Holland. Her cultural commentary at www.tribes.org ; Bomb, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Black Issues Book Review, The Boston Globe, and Essence and www.Essence.com. She has also written catalogue essays for diverse artists including Jane Dickson, Rhonda Schaller and Rick (Richard J.) Powell. “Cosmopolitan in Brooklyn” ran from 2006-2009 in Calabar Magazine and she is a contributing editor to Bomb Magazine where interviews with Cornelius Eady and Ida Applebroog were published along with articles on Carl E. Hazlewood, Tony Medina, El Anatsui, Wesley Brown and forthcoming with Emma Amos. For tribes, she has published reviews and commentaries on Yuko Otomo, Toni Morrison, Dawoud Bey, Carrie Mae Weems, and Tonya M. Foster. She has been interviewed television broadcast by AFTV, radio broadcasts bt Neil Silberblatt and DuEwa Frazier among others. Interviews with Rochelle Spencer for Mosaic Magazine and Poets & Writers, Lewis Warsh for www.theottter.org, and Barbara Henning for the Poetry Project Newsletter are published and in a video document at JMU’s Furious Flower Poetry Center in a conversation with Afaa Michael Weaver.