Arkansas native cited as laureate
NEW YORK’S POET
Arkansas native Patricia Spears Jones has been named the new State Poet of New York by the New York State Writers Institute.
Jones, who has lived in Brooklyn, N.Y., since the early ’90s, was born in Forrest City and graduated in 1959 from Forrest City High School before attending Rhodes College in Memphis.
When she first got the email about being named New York’s poet laureate, Jones figured that she was being scammed. When she learned it was legit, “I was jumping up and down, screaming,” she laughs.
Jones is the author of “A Lucent Fire New and Selected Poems” and three other full-length collections and five chapbooks. “The Beloved Community,” her latest book of poems, will be published Sept. 26 by Copper Canyon Press. She received the 2017 Jackson Literary Prize and a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is also the founder of American Poets Congress, which is dedicated to connecting poetry with politics.
She wrote her first poem when she was about 12, but wasn’t serious about writing until college.
“I’m the poster child for persistence,” she says. “And I got better. That’s the best thing of all. When people read me they’re reading someone who has mastered her craft.”
Jones was chosen by a panel of jurors and students organized by the writer’s institute, who also named children’s book author Jacqueline Woodson the State Author. Jones succeeds Willie Perdomo, the most recent state poet.
Former New York State Poets Audre Lorde, Sharon Olds and Perdomo “are poets whose work that I love,” she says. “Being on that list with them is just amazing.”
Jones and Woodson will receive $10,000 and serve in their positions for two years. On Friday, they will be awarded the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit for Poetry and the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction, respectively, at the University at Albany in Albany, N.Y.
“The fact that two Black women are representing New York state’s literary heritage for the next two years is huge,” Jones says.
AN “OA” WIN Three poems by Jones were published in the Winter 2008 Southern Music Issue of Oxford American, the Conway-based literary magazine. We bring this up because the magazine was among the winners of the Whiting Foundation’s sixth annual Literary Magazine Prize. The announcement was made last week and included The Paris Review, Mizna, Orion, n+1, Guernica and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Each publication receives $20,000, according to the foundation.
In their comments, the judges called the magazine “our most adventurous and authoritative window on the South, pushing beyond headlines to deliver a textured, ever-evolving portrait of its cultural wealth.”