Patricia Spears Jones is a Brooklyn-based African American poet and author of A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems from White Pine Press and seven other collections and chapbooks who is the Jackson Poetry Prize winner for 2017 and a 2016 Pushcart Prize winner; a recipient of a Barbara Deming Fund award and the Foundation from Contemporary Arts as well as grants from the NEA and NYFA. Her work is included in major anthologies, most recently, Truth to Power: Writers Respond to the Rhetoric of Hate and Fear (Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts); The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (U. of Arkansas Press); BAX: Best American Experiment Writing, 2016 (Wesleyan U. Press) Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin (WW Norton) and Resisting Arrest: poems to stretch the sky (Jacar Press). Two plays commissioned by Mabou Mines, the famed experimental theater company were produced in New York City.  She is an emeritus senior fellow for the Black Earth Institute.  She has read and led workshops at The Fine Arts Work Center  Poets House, St. Mark’s Poetry Project, Naropa University, The Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, The Poetry Center at SFSU and Kelley Writers House at UPenn. She is teaching at Adelphi University, Fall 2017.