Patricia Spears Jones

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New York State Poet, 2023–2025
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Patricia Spears Jones was born in 1951 in Forrest City, Arkansas. She earned her BA at Rhodes College in 1973 and her MFA from Vermont College.

Spears Jones is the author of five collections of poetry: The Beloved Community (Copper Canyon Press, 2023); A Lucent Fire: New & Selected Poems (White Pine Press, 2015); Painkiller (Tia Chucha Press, 2010); Femme du Monde (Tia Chucha Press, 2006); and The Weather That Kills (Coffee House Press, 1995). She coedited Ordinary Women: Mujeres Comunes: an Anthology of Poetry by New York City Women (Ordinary Women Books, 1978) with Sara Miles, Sandra María Esteves, and Fay Chiang. Spears Jones also edited THINK: Poems For Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Hat, published by BOMB magazine in 2009.

Spears Jones has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Oscar Williams and Gene Derwood Award from the New York Community Trust, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Goethe Institute, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

During the 1970s, Spears Jones organized a poetry event for the first Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts at the Women’s Interarts Center, which was focused on Black women in media. She was also a member of The Sisterhood, a group of Black women writers, editors, and publishers recently chronicled by Courtney Thorssen in The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture (Columbia University Press, 2023). 

A resident of New York City since the 1970s, Spears Jones has taught creative writing at Hunter College, Barnard College, Adelphi University, and Hollins University as the 2020 Louis D. Rubin Writer-in-Residence. She has also led poetry workshops at Gemini Ink, Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center, Naropa, Poets House, Brooklyn Poets, Cave Canem, and at branches of both the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library. In 1984, she became the first Black poet to serve as program coordinator for The Poetry Project. She is an emeritus fellow for Black Earth Institute and an organizer of the American Poets Congress.

In 2023, Spears Jones was appointed New York State Poet. In 2024, she was appointed the inaugural Lucille Clifton Poetry Chair at the Community of Writers. In the same year, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.