March 29, 2012: UNH Writers Series presents poet Patricia Spears Jones 
Join us for a reading by poet, writer, editor, teacher, and culture maven Patricia Spears Jones. Ms. Jones' latest poetry collection, Swimming to America, was published in late summer 2011 by Red Glass Books.
TIME: 5:00 p.m.
DATE: Thursday, March 29th
LOCATION: Hamilton Smith Hall, room 127
Born and raised in Arkansas, Patricia Spears Jones has lived in New York City since the mid-1970s where she has been involved in the city's poetry and theater scenes as poet, editor, anthologist, teacher and former Program Coordinator for the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and Mabou Mines, the internationally acclaimed theater collective. She is the author of three poetry collections; Painkiller (2010) and Femme du Monde (2006) from Tia Chucha Press and The Weather That Kills (1994) from Coffee House Press. Swimming to America, a new chapbook due from Red Glass Books, will be published in late summer, 2011. Her poetry is anthologized in Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days; Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry; Bowery Women: Poems; broken land: Poems of Brooklyn; Poetry After 911; Blood & Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard; Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology; Sisterfire and Best American Poetry, 2000. She has written musical theater works commissioned and produced by internationally renowned theater company, Mabou Mines: ‘Mother’ in 1994 and Song for New York: What Women Do When Men Sit Knitting in 2007. She also edited and contributed to Think: Poems for Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Day Hat (2009) and co-edited the groundbreaking anthology, Ordinary Women: Poetry by New York City Women (1978) which featured an introduction by Adrienne Rich.
Patricia Spears Jones has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Goethe Institute. Green Integer selected her for The PIP Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Poetry in English 2005-2006. Agni selected “Sapphire” as an honorable mention for the Anne Sexton Poetry Prize in 2000. She has received fellowships to Yaddo, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. More information about Patricia Spears Jones can be found on her website www.psjones.com.
UNH Writers Series events are made possible with the support of the MacArthur/Simic and Edmund G. Miller Funds. This event is free and open to the public. Please contact the UNH English Department for more information about this event: (603) 862-1313.
