Please join us for this Sunday afternoon headline reading at the 2021 Massachusetts Poetry Festival. This virtual reading, sponsored by The Shipman Agency, will feature poets Ariana Reines and Patricia Spears Jones.
Find out more and register for the Festival at festival.masspoetry.org.
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. In language that is simultaneously sensuous, wise-cracking, explicit, and rollicking, Spears Jones describes a world rich in beauty and longing, with pain tempered always by joy. 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 is out from White Pine Press (White Pine Press Distinguished Poets series) which features her 2016 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 the Passaic County Community College.
Ariana Reines is an award-winning poet, playwright, and translator. Her most recent book of poetry is A Sand Book (Tin House, 2019), which was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her other books include Tiffany’s Poems (Song Cave, 2015), Ramayana (Song Cave, 2015), The Origin of the World (Semiotext(e), 2014), Beyond Relief (Belladonna*, 2013), Thursday (Spork Press, 2012), Mercury (Fence Books, 2011), Coeur de Lion (Fence Books, 2007), and The Cow (Fence Books, 2006). Her poems have been anthologized in Corrected Slogans (Triple Canopy, 2013), Miscellaneous Uncatalogued Materials (Triple Canopy, 2011), Against Expression (Northwestern University Press, 2011), and Gurlesque (Saturnalia, 2010). Reines has been described as “one of the crucial voices of her generation” by Michael Silverblatt on NPR’s Bookworm. In 2020, she won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She’s been a MacDowell Fellow, has judged the National Poetry Series, and writes regularly for ArtForum.
Hosted by Mass Poetry; free for students; pay what you can option for general admission. Register here.