Patricia Spears Jones

Patricia Spears Jones is an award-winning African-American poet, editor, playwright, teacher and former Program Coordinator at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. Her poetry collections are Painkiller and Femme du Monde (Tia Chucha Press) and The Weather That Kills (Coffee House Press) and the chapbooks Mythologizing Always and Repuestas! Her poetry is anthologized in Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days; Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry; Bowery Women: Poems; broken land: Poems of Brooklyn; Poetry After 911; Blood & Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard; Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology; Sisterfire; and Best American Poetry, 2000. Commentary on her work can be found Post-Jazz Poetics: A Social History by Jennifer D. Ryan. Poems, interviews, reviews and commentary in www.kwelijournal.com, Bomb, Callaloo, Calabar; Reverie: Midwest African American Review; Downtown Brooklyn; Fifth Wednesday; Barrow Street; The Oxford American; Tuesday; An Art Project; The Poetry Project Newslette; African Voices; PMS#8; Black Renaissance Noire; Court Green; nocturne;, Black Issues Book Review; Essenc;, The Brooklyn Rail; The Southampton Review; TriQuarterly, Ploughshares and www.tribes.org. Two plays were commissioned and produced by Mabou Mines: ‘Mother’ in 1994 and Song for New York: What Women Do When Men Sit Knitting in 2007. She edited and contributed to Think: Poems for Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Day Hat. Her website is www.psjones.com.