Patricia Spears Jones audio and moving image collection

circa 1970s-2004

Born in Forrest City, Arkansas, Patricia Spears Jones (b. 1951) is a poet, playwright, educator, cultural activist, and anthologist. Jones earned a BA from Rhodes College in 1973, and an MFA from Vermont College in 1992. She is the author of five poetry collections: The Weather That Kills (1995), Femme Du Monde (2006), Painkiller (2010), A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems (2015), and The Beloved Community (2023). She is also the author of five chapbooks, including Living in the Love Economy (2014). She wrote two plays, Mother (1994) and Song for New York: What Women Do While Men Sit Knitting (2007), commissioned and produced by Mabou Mines, an experimental theatre company founded in 1970 and based in New York City.

Jones edited the anthologies Ordinary Women: An Anthology of New York City Women (1978) and THINK: Poems for Aretha Franklin's Inauguration Day Hat (2009). Her poems have been widely anthologized in works such as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (2013); Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin (2016); BAX 2016: Best American Experimental Writing (2017); WORD: An Anthology by A Gathering of Tribes (2017); and African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song (2020).

Jones's poems are also published in numerous print and online journals including The Brooklyn Rail, The New Yorker, and Plume. Her essays, memoir, 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 journals including The Black Scholar, Bomb, Pangyrus, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Rumpus, The Writers Chronicle, and the literary platform Tribes.org.

Jones taught creative writing at Adelphi University, Barnard College, Hollins University, and Hunter College as the 2020 Louis H. Rubin Jr. Writer-in-Residence. She also taught at the College of New Rochelle, LaGuardia Community College, Parsons The New School for Design (now Parsons School of Design), and Queens College. She facilitated several poetry workshops across the US. Additionally, she has read at many arts and literary venues, as well as colleges and universities. Since circa 2023, Jones has been an adjunct associate professor at Barnard College. In addition to her writing career, Jones also worked as a development officer, administrator, board member, advisor, educator, and consultant of various non-profit organizations.

Jones is the recipient of multiple awards including the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize. She received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She was also awarded several residencies such as a Robert Rauschenberg residency; and at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, via the BAU Institute; the Millay Colony; the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; and Yaddo. She is emeritus fellow for Black Earth Institute and organizer of the American Poets Congress. In September 2023, she was recognized as the New York State Poet, and in May 2025, she received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Hartwick College.