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 nine other collections and chapbooks. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize 2016 and won the Poets & Writers Jackson Poetry Prize for 2017. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and in journals as diverse as The New Yorker, The Brooklyn Rail and Cutthroat Journal.  Her plays have been commissioned and produced by Mabou Mines. She has collaborated with musicians and visual artists such as Jason Hwang, Ras Moshe Burnett, Nicole Peyrafitte, Lenora Champagne and Danny Tisdale. She is 2015 recipient of a Money for Women/The Barbara Deming Fund award and has received NEA and NYFA grants and awards from Foundation for Contemporary Art and the New York Community Trust. She was awarded residencies at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France via the BAU Institute; the Rauschenberg Foundation residency on Captiva Island, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Yaddo and The Millay Colony. She was the 2020 Louis D, Rubin Writer in Residence at Hollins University. She has taught summer workshops for Fine Arts Work Center, Truro Center for the Arts and Medgar Evers College, Wild Seeds Workshops for Black Writers. She has served as a mentor for Emerge, Surface Be for The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. She is an organizer of American Poets Congress.