An Evening with New York State Poet Patricia Spears Jones

About this event
Join us for an evening of readings and conversation with New York State Poet Laureate Patricia Spears Jones. Jones is a poet, playwright, educator, and cultural activist. Winner of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, her most recent book The Beloved Community was released in 2023. Jones's archives are housed in the Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books division at Schomburg Center. The evening will explore the evolution of her writing, the necessity of personal archives to shape one's legacy, and the use of archives to develop new material. Jones will be in conversation with Brent Hayes Edwards, professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University. This is an official 2024 Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend event.
Learn more about Patricia Spears Jones's archives at the Schomburg Center:
Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division
Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division
Other material material across NYPL
PARTICIPANTS
PATRICIA SPEARS JONES is the New York State Poet Laureate, a playwright, educator, and cultural activist. Winner of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, Jones is author of A Lucent Fire New and Selected Poems and three full-length collections and five chapbooks. Her most recent book The Beloved Community was released in 2023.She co-edited the groundbreaking anthology, Ordinary Women: An Anthology of New York City Women. In addition to her published poems, essays, memoir, and interviews, she has curated programs at The Poetry Project of St. Marks Church. Jones is currently an Adjunct Associate Professor at Barnard College.
BRENT HAYES EDWARDS is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the Director of the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center. In 2022-23 he is one of the three inaugural Ford Foundation Scholars-in-Residence at The Museum of Modern Art. In 2015 Edwards was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2020 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His award-winning books include Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (2017), The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003)and most recently, winner of the Jazz Journalists Association 2024 Award for Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life in Music, by Henry Threadgill with Brent Hayes Edwards.
GET THE BOOK
Copies of The Beloved Community and A Lucent Fire by Patricia Spears Jones will be available for purchase from the Schomburg Shop in Harlem.