In 2024, Patricia Spears Jones was named an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Jones will develop and implement a series of intergenerational workshops that will foster conversations about social justice, environmental degradation, systemic oppression, and cultural resistance, and what beauty means. The workshops are based on a statement in Walt Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas” essay: “a new Literature [. . .] a new Poetry, are to be, in my opinion, the only sure and worthy supports and expressions of the American Democracy.”