October 2025 Feature: Patricia Spears Jones

Patricia Spears Jones is a celebrated poet, playwright, and educator. She served as the New York Poet Laureate from 2023-2025.

Arkansas-born Patricia Spears Jones has lived and worked in New York City since 1974.  She is a poet, playwright, educator, cultural activist, and anthologist and was appointed New York State Poet (2023-25) and a Poet Laureate Fellowship from The Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation. She is the recipient of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers. She received a Lifetime Achievement Award from The Porter Fund in 2024 and an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Hartwick College in 2025. She received awards from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Foundation for Contemporary Art, Goethe Institute, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is author of  The Beloved Community and A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems and three full-length collections and five chapbooks. At the Rauschenberg Residency, she published Collapsing Forrest City, Photo Giclée.  The Devil’s Wife Considers is forthcoming from A Song Cave. Her poems are in several anthologies among them: 250 Years of African American Poetry; 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI: Best of Small Presses; Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African-American Poets,  and in journals such as About Place Journal;  Paterson Literary Review; Cutthroat Journal; alinejournal.com/convergence; The New Yorker and The Brooklyn Rail.  She co-edited ORDINARY WOMEN: An Anthology of New York City Women Poets (1978) and edited THINK: Poems for Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Day Hat (2009).  Her plays “Mother” (music by Carter Burwell) and “Song for New York: What Women Do When Men Sit Knitting” (music by Lisa Gutkin) were commissioned and produced by Mabou Mines.

Sugar baby

caramel

swear

dust

might

fuss

When you leave sugar babies

out too long, they will swear

you have to stack

all the dust

the bookshelves

with all your might

or truly

Sugar baby will make a bigger fuss

something about lost love broken promises burnt caramel

crystalline

as sugar spreads

on the floor

on the floor

Mystery

The essence of a mystery particularly a murder mystery is trust

Because murder is intimate, most victims know their killer.

The killer could be your father, your mother, your son

Your daughter, a cousin, an aunt, an uncle, your best friend

From first grade, your first ever boyfriend or your mistress

Or a co-worker who loves to waltz but only tells you, victim

Only you. Who trusts your mother, father, son, daughter

Who sees the cousin on occasion or your aunt and uncle

At important family gatherings-weddings, funerals

Graduations. That first ever lover returns from years

In a bad marriage, your mistress has for years suffered

Your bad marriage. And suddenly something is amiss

Promises left dangling –the fearsome psychic cliff

Or love slashed by money or pain—an illness the brain

Sodden with the fevers of some romance (dime store)

Dime store—no one has dimes anymore or coins

Of the realm, but there it is again that moment

When knife plunges or the gun reports and reports

The tea is almond scented. The patron falls face forward

Onto the table. The victim’s china cup a gift from

Her killer. Many claim lack of love or greed or anger

Precipitates the act, but why this lack—the greed

Calculated easily-the will, stocks, bonds, trust

Funds-there again that trust-how did it depart

Quickly, slowly, as the seasons moved from cold

To arm to cold again. Your arms no longer hold

Embraces tender enough or lustful enough or

Who will ever know—a ruined body photographed

And pinned to the police detective’s board.

A careful display of someone who forgot somehow

To fear kin as well as kith--do not drink that

Almond scented tea.

FOR THE SOLSTICE, June 20, 2024

Well

You would think a poet could so easily say what needs to be said

And sometimes that is true, but

That awkward phrase, the botched flirtation, the sudden need to

Correct the message

Happens all the time

We roar and wrap and cling and throw words around as if we are playing

A mad game sort of soccer meets dodgeball, and the weather is always

Quarrelsome. Sunlight just over the raining clouds.

The Devil is working again. Striking his wife and screaming at his children

Beasts in Saville Row suits groveling in the money pits of financial capitals

Around the world Oh how clumsy this image, the suits, the groveling and yet

The spoils of Corruption are manifest and almost everywhere. A poet worried

About the phrase that makes the sonnet zing, well the poet cares. But Big

Corruption uses the economy of language i.e.

MONEY IS BLISS

WHO CARES FROM FRAUD

MY ROLEX IS BIGGER THAN YOURS

How to capitalize on this trend is but what awaits the darling graduates—their

Mastery certified, but all else precarious. It is why wine matters on certain occasions

Pleasure must be measured, thus the toast, the clink, the glad end of difficult days.

MOTHER (an excerpt)

A play with lyrics based on MOTHER by GORKI and other sources.

for MABOU MINES

RECRUITMENT: (SON AND MALE REVOLUTIONARY)

SON: Just the other day, I heard a peasant say, "There's no road leading away from the poverty; all roads lead to it, and none out of it". We have to change these beliefs--that our lot in life is cast at birth.

REV. LEADER: You have begun to discern the true situation of the oppressed. You will work well for the movement. While I commend your assertion, you must understand the despair, the resignation of the poor. They are often blind to their complicity in their own tyranny.

SON: But why, it seems so clear to me....

REV. LEADER: But you question your position, you have found the words, the ideas that analyze oppression. You have looked beyond your own condition and you know now why we must organize and agitate to bring this new knowledge to those who only now have an inkling of how they have been and continue to be exploited.

SON: But they know. My father- may he rest in peace, for he had none in his life-worked so hard. So very hard. He was a big man who handled heavy machinery. And he took on larger tasks as he grew older, weaker. Did his wages increase? No. We became poorer. And the work was harder for him. He drank, fought with his fellow workers in the bars the ring the factory’s gates. He took his rage out on me, my mother. Beat us. Beat us, like so many others. He grew older, weaker, poorer.

REV. LEADER: Yes, as do many working men who find solace in drinking and violence against those they have sworn to protect, to love. But you must realize, they understand, they accept the power of authority. They have learned how to endure oppression and replicate it in their homes. They have not learned how to oppose it. We are the ones with the tools, the necessary tools to build a new world in which tyranny is toppled, not endured. The movement is here to enlighten, to bring hope, to those who live within the shadows of poverty, powerlessness. We will create new proverbs. One could say all roads to the master’s house are roads of despair. All roads leading from the master’s house are roads of hope. And we will supply the roadmaps leading from the masters’ places. This is how the movement will help bring new ideas, make a new kind of faith for our brothers.

SON: Through our literature. Our action.

-------------------------------

MOTHER: Who are you talking to?

SON: Just my friend. We’re just reviewing my studies.

MOTHER: Bible study?

SON: Yes and other things. Won’t be long. Actually, Mother, could you get me something to drink?

MOTHER: More tea?

--------------------------------

REV. LEADER: We can refresh ourselves later. We have much work to do. We must change our distribution plans. The conditions are timely for artful agitation given the bosses' recent acts. Their latest efforts are harsher, more desperate than we had surmised. We have to let the workers know their own strength. We have to commence the struggle. Change comes in increments, my friend, but when it comes, it is as a deluge, an avalanche, a jagged rift in society’s seamless fabric.

SON: This change, this great revolution, is it far off?

REV. LEADER: Not if we do our work. But you must be careful. Many oppose our work. Spies are everywhere. That is why we must organize a new distribution plan. The bosses and police are thick as, well, thieves. They probe us constantly. They have followed me across the country, throughout Europe.

SON: You have been to so many cities, countries, places I only read about.

MOTHER: Do you want milk with your tea? And what about your friend?

REV. LEADER: You will get to those places in due time. That is, if we don’t find ourselves imprisoned, or martyred. Does your mother know that you have a cache of forbidden books? Does she know about our work?

SON: Well, I, no, she, well, I never think that anyone would bother her.

REV. LEADER: You must think of all of your relationships. What does she think you’re doing? How does she feel about you?

SON: She is fearful. But I tell her that I am trying to better our circumstances with my studies. There are others in the village who are suspicious. They are not literate and I am. I show her books that have no pictures, no nude women, no exotics, nothing that could be seen as blasphemous. She is grateful that I do not drink or gamble or strike her or other women. How can she be critical of me? My actions are superior to my father’s in many ways.

REV. LEADER: Yes, well a chaste life helps. But even so, you must be careful. It could be by accident or design, but sooner or later unknown to you, someone will see a paper, notice an announcement, hear something you say, and then the police or the army or the boss’ hired thugs will come here. They will interrogate both you and your mother. She must be able to answer these questions for they will not hesitate to punish her as well as you or me or any of our comrades. She is only a Mother, but they will exploit her as they will exploit any means to silence us. Remember, the authorities hate our every idea, our every act. They forbid our work because our cause is just.

SON: I know that. I am very careful. But so much must be done.

REV. LEADER: And I sense that you will do all that is required.

MOTHER: Your tea is ready.

 __________________________________________________________

SPY SONG

Quiet, we enter the requisite scene

In search of the slips of the tongue.

The secrets shared but not too discretely.

We wait, we watch for the break in the bond

of those whose lives are not worth living.

We wear the same hats, shoes and suits.

We listen to the talk of revolution.

We prick the little disputes

that questions these tiresome solutions

to a status quo who desires only lives worth living.

There’s the mother

There’s the son

There’s the rebel

There’s the nun

And we believe that not one

has a life worth living.

We are silent in stuffy rooms,

Noisy in beat-up chairs,

As they talk of ideologies one by one.

We are the ones for whom no one prepares

As we find new ways to cause great harm

to those who do have lives worth living.

___________________________________________________________

MOTHER AND SON ARGUMENT

MOTHER: Does your friend publish these books?

SON: Yes. They are very important. There’s knowledge that our people need, that our enemies, the government, want to suppress.

MOTHER: Enemies? Our government? What kind of talk is this? Who are these people? We have to be careful. We don’t have much money. Your job could be in jeopardy. We could lose our home. What are you doing?

SON: Mother, this is very important work. We can improve our lives if we clearly understand the economic situation. It should not be reasonable that there is widespread poverty, ignorance, fear. That young men are conscripted for wars in which no one wins but the wealthy. Working men face the same enemy day in, day out. Mother, that enemy killed father. These men devalue our labor, yet demand much more of it! It is brutal…

MOTHER: Brutal! What do you know of brutality, of work! You’re a boy! You read a few books. Befriend unsavory people. Bring home these problems. Every day I feed you, clean this house…

SON: Mother, these problems did not start with my friends or these books. You simply have no idea of the crisis that working men face. Father did die at the hands of his enemies.

MOTHER: He died a drunk!

SON: Yes, drunk from years of toil. And for what: this mortgaged house, schools that almost left me illiterate, religious faith that even you do not adhere to.

MOTHER: It is these books, these ideas!

<POLICE ENTER—HOUSE IS DESTROYED>

End of scene

THE INTERVIEW

This interview was conducted between Patricia Spears Jones and Jae Nichelle on August 29th, 2025.

Thank you so much for sharing an excerpt of Mother. I would love to hear more about how this script came to be and your experience with producing it.

“Mother” was commissioned by Ruth Malaczech, the late great actress and one of the co-founders of Mabou Mines. I’d known the company’s work from 1973 when they performed as part of the Dilemma Symposium at Rhodes College, known then as Southwestern at Memphis.  The first time I saw a Beckett play was when they performed “Come and Go.” And I saw the first iterations of The B-Beaver Animation, authored by Lee Breuer. Ruth, Lee, Joanne Akalitis,  Phillip Glass, David Warrilow and Fred Neumann had formed their company while in Paris and then they returned to North America and held up in Nova Scotia at Mabou Mines, thus the odd,  exotic name. I was fascinated by the company’s play development-they could take weeks, months, years to perfect a work. Lee was the authorial force, and all the actors were stellar. They did work unlike any other. When I came to New York City, my ex-boyfriend and other friends from Southwestern had moved to New York to work with Lee and pursue their artistic inclinations. I know major background, fast forward two decades and what I realized was that  Ruth was a huge fan of my poetry. She bought my books and gave them to others. She thought I  could write a play. 

So, Ruth was working with John McGrath, a talented young director on Brecht’s version of  Gorky’s novel, Mother, but they just weren’t feeling it. You must go all in with Brecht or do something else. They decided to do something else and so asked me to tackle the project. Oh, that Russian novel was dark and murky, the peasants illiterate, workers exploited and revolutionaries bloodthirsty, etc. But at its heart was a blueprint for radicalization and organizing through the mother’s evolution. I wrote the piece with Ruth in mind—I knew her acting gestures, her vocal tics, and I was also thinking of my mother and her struggles and the struggles of mothers held down by economics, lack of education, class status, and partner loss. I started the play as a very conventional piece and Ruth basically said we don’t want that. I got a 3-day  residency at Vassar College, sat in a dorm room with a writing desk and wrote a more unconventional first draft. I also had to keep in mind that this was a collaboration with a musician, the amazing Carter Burwell, then known for his cinema scores for the Coen Brothers films, so I also had to write song lyrics. What I did with the play was introduce the character of the spy and the wealthy female revolutionary and with that I could expound on the Gorky blueprint but make it my own. Moreover, I allowed the mother her own sense of the erotic and the whimsical, even as she suffers indignities and fights for justice, so fiercely she must go underground. The casting was deliberately multi-racial and multi-ethnic. We also collaborated with visual artists, musicians, and dancers. John McGrath has some seriously great staging ideas. When we premiered at La Mama, we used all the tiers in that huge space, from mini  “domestic islands” to a “jail.” If the company had more resources, we could have moved it to a different theater, and it would have sold out. 

It was a revelation to see the play performed four years ago as part of Mabou Mines’ 50^th Anniversary and as it was ending, people came into the theater telling me that thousands were in the streets protesting SCOTUS rescinding Roe v. Wade. As the Emotions sang “we have come a long way, we still got a long way to go.” 

I’m so struck by the line in “For the Solstice,” that “You would think a poet could so easily say what needs to be said.” How do you work on saying “what needs to be said?”

I like to use refutation as a strategy, and “For the Solstice, June 20, 2024” utilizes this. Poets are tasked, too often, with making sense of the senseless in language that is concrete and yet transformative. There is little ease in doing this kind of work. In many ways, the poem is an Ars poetica—what does it take to make a poem that speaks on the terrible things we face daily (at this point it seems hourly) and yet find pleasure in our capacity to breathe, communicate, drink what offers solace. Every poet on this planet understands the precarity of our lived experience and how that affects our linguistic gifts. People do think we easily say what needs to be said—but  every poet knows that is otherwise and we muddle, mangle, or clarify words to find “the glad end of difficult days.”

In a 2024 interview, you’ve described yourself as a “flâneuse,” inspired by chance glimpses, overheard lines, art, scents, and the subway. Which sensory encounter most recently sparked a poem for you, and what made it resonate?

Scott Hightower in a review of The Weather That Kills called me a “flaneuse” which I guess is the female version of flaneur. But it so makes sense. Urban-based poets, especially we who live in New York City, find ourselves given words, phrases, stories every time we take the subway, go to a performance, overhear a dinner conversation, which may be super intimate or silly. You have to get out and walk about, which is what a flaneuse does. My greatest issue as I age is loss of mobility. I used to walk like 5-10 city blocks and just take in whatever local color there was.  One of my first truly successful poems was 14^th Street/New York and the poet’s I (me) walks across the boulevard—my favorite segment was about First Avenue. In The Beloved Community,  the streets of Brooklyn get the same kind of attention. I owe much of this to Frank O’Hara, the ultimate flaneur of New York City—he gave us the foundation for both seeing the city and finding ways to truly talk about it or any other urban place where accidental intimacy, startling visuals, and comic or tragic speech (note the poem “Somethings in the air” from The Beloved Community) is available. You must have your mind, eyes, ears, and your heart open to receive the information.

You’ve lived in New York City since the 1970s and have previously said you arrived with only $3 in your pocket. How has your sense of belonging—and your creative identity—evolved in the city over decades of writing, activism, and teaching?

I am writing a memoir of my time as a young woman poet in the 1970s. I lived downtown,  which means I jumped headfirst into polyglot New York. All kinds of people from every kind of background could be found in the East Village. But most importantly, the Village and lower  Manhattan were where artists lived, and you know, within a week of coming to the city with friends on a break, I knew I had to stay. I was born to live in New York City. Those comedies and cop shows and movies that painted a rather complex vision of the place I now call home did not prepare me for the cold, the economic instability, the obstacles. But I grew up in Forrest  City, Arkansas during the last decades of legalized segregation, so I knew how to make a way from no way. I did, and so many others have. I had no real ambitions or ideas of what I would do and I am glad that I allowed myself to experience this place, those difficulties and figure out how to make a life that allowed and allows me to always learn something new, something different to inspire me to not go with the “okey doke” in my poetics, in my politics, in my struggles to make the world or my part of it better. I know that I am extremely lucky. I have suffered economic instability, but I have not been homeless. No one has sexually assaulted me; I walk into all kinds of places with the assumption that I should be in this museum or that gallery or at the opera or listening to experimental jazz musicians blow their minds out. That’s why David Murray wrote a song for me. That’s why poets have dedicated works to me. That’s why Jane Dickson used my image in her mosaic project for Times Square. I am literally in the architecture of New York City—I so belong.

On the subject of New York, you’ve participated in the local literary scene by curating with The Poetry Project and so much more. Looking back, how did these early spaces and community interactions shape both your poetics and your activism?

I have started to write about my poetry years in New York City; it’s been fascinating revisiting spaces that both welcomed and terrified me. New York City in the early 1970s was very open,  slightly deranged as the economy tumbled and the city lost its shimmer. The East Village was poor, the people, the buildings, but for artists it was rich—those buildings were cheap, the people fairly friendly in that check you out first, then see if I go with you, New York City sort of way. It was the first place where then 5 ft 2 ½ inches me towered over these short people from around the world. It was where you could go to the grocer at 2 in the morning. Where you could leave your laundry. It was where you could starve or freeze to death. Welcomed and terrified. So, I  dived in because I was not returning to Arkansas or Tennessee, or Georgia, and I was not interested in the West. In My First Reading, I talk about the Poetry Project workshop, what leadership looks like—I think I am a disciple of Lewis Warsh. 

In another unpublished piece, “Body Heat” I explore the East Village poetry scene through the lens of experiences with the Nuyorican Poets Café. Throughout the early 1970s, poets around  New York City created reading series in cafes, churches, bars, and independent art galleries.  There were organizations and workshops everywhere. The Harlem Writers Guild, the Frederick  Douglass Center, Basement Workshop, the Nuyorican Poets Café, and the Poetry Project were the more prominent ones. Bob Holman and others created a Weekly Poetry Calendar. Many of the poets were aligned with activists’ groups, but much of this was ad hoc. We were young and trying to figure out what we wanted in our lives and how we were going to live them. 

Fortunately, I got to meet and work with Steve Cannon, Lorenzo Thomas, Maureen Owen, June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Barbara Barg, Fay Chiang, Thulani Davis, Susan Sherman, Cynthia Kraman, Michelle Wallace, Faith Ringgold, Margo Jefferson, Charlotte Carter, Marie  Brown, David Earl Jackson, Jessica Hagedorn, Lois Elain Griffith, Safiya Henderson Holmes,  Sekou Sundiata, Melvin Dixon, Gary Lenhart, Sara Miles, and Sandra Maria Esteves, who with Fay and me published Ordinary Women: An Anthology of New York City Women Poets with a foreword by Adrienne Rich. You can see by this partial list of poetry players that I was part of an extraordinary cohort. We worked together on different events, journals, benefits—anti-war, anti-apartheid, civil and human rights. My curatorial stance was always to bring diverse poets—by race, gender, or aesthetics together—I’ve always seen art as service to the expansion of human consciousness. Sometimes conflicting aesthetics, etc., did not work, but often something refreshing happens. At the Project ,I really pushed for the inclusion of poets of color in an organization that prided itself on its radical roots, but was still a mostly White male space, even as I was the Program Coordinator, while Eileen Myles was the Artistic Director. It was tense,  difficult, but I got more folks through the door. I have often been the “first one” in—the Black pioneer. For some, that position led to greater positions, for me it did not. But I look back with a great deal of pride in that I opened doors, did not back down, learned how to navigate difficult people in complex spaces, because this was safe, but you know what, I WAS NEVER BORED. 

Now decades later, I understand how and why we must never retreat from our principles and our demands for justice, inclusion, and power. Never. Whether it is how we curate a program, organize a panel, dor evelop a community-based project, as a poet and writer, I know it is best to go with your gut and not worry about who is going to police you because somebody somewhere always will. 

As the New York State Poet Laureate (2023–2025) and recipient of the Academy of American Poets fellowship, you shaped public poetry initiatives. What most excites you about your public work?

I thoroughly enjoyed my time as State Poet; I was most unwilling to give up my invisible crown.  I can’t say the many trips up the Hudson were always fun, but I got to go to the Adirondacks, to Rochester, where I worked with Writers & Books on my Poet Laureate Fellowship Project, to Syracuse, and serve on a panel about laureates at the 2025 AWP. I am very proud of the Across  Generations Workshop Model I developed and launched with Writers & Books in Rochester. I  was able to produce a program, curate workshop leaders, so I could pay other poets to do their wonderful work and offer Master Classes. On top of that, because of the State Poet appointment,  Hartwick College reached out to me and gave me an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree at their Commencement in May. I am from Arkansas, so it has been fascinating to be the state poet for New York. But like so many others, I migrated to New York City at the tail end of  The Great Migration, and while I did not flee hardships as so many before me, I did flee what felt like a very stifling and limited life. I am glad I got in a car with friends and came up North. I brought some of my enthusiasm and my questions to the sites—why in a town where every street has some edifice of Frederick Douglass, there is such poor political leadership on the part of Black and Brown people (Rochester); what would it take to get more folks of color to the Adirondacks; how do we connect with union organizers in New York City (that proved very difficult), etc. I hope that many poets find ways to use the Walt Whitman prompt I developed and seek to create intergenerational workshops. We need to talk to each other across generations. I don’t write for the youth or the elderly or women or queer people or veterans, I write for anyone who reads and wants to seek in language a deeper consciousness. Also, knowing that I was on the same list as Audre Lorde, who was an early champion of my work, made me happy— she looks on all the poets she mentored and tells us to keep kicking doors open, and party when you can.

How can people support you right now?

Oh, who could be my patron—send me $3,500 per month for the rest of my life, then I wouldn't worry about groceries or rent. Well, if that’s not how you can help me, do read my poetry, buy books, come to workshops I hold, invite me to your campus—my booking agent is The Shipman Agency. But mostly, you can help me and all poets, but especially we Black women poets, by keeping our voices honest, open, and fierce. I do not shy away from being a strong Black woman. I am also quite sensitive, but if armor is called for, I put it on. I did not grow up middle-class, so my expectations were never assumed. I did grow up in a home where reading, thinking, and education were encouraged and praised. I am one of those first in her family to go to college. I am one of those in my family to travel abroad, and not because I was in the military. I hope that you read, think, and educate as long as you live. Reading, thinking, and educated people help poets. And we are grateful for thoughtful, serious, critical readings of our work. Too few poets, and I am one of them, have been given serious critical attention—those peer-reviewed book reviews, essays, etc. may not seem important, but they really are.

Name another Black woman writer people should know.

CHARLOTTE CARTER. She started as a poet, a fabulous prose poet, but now she writes very smart, sexy murder mysteries.

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