The Brooklyn Rail

A View from Prospect Heights

Just before New Year’s Eve, I dined with my friend Janet in a restaurant where the holiday decorations were monkeys. Monkeys dressed in Venetian robes—silk brocades, rich velvets.

The General is in the House

Nigger is a word that Baldwin detested. He could say it, but he could not use it as anything other than a pejorative.

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Patricia Spears Jones is an African American poet,  writer  and occasional blogger whose most recent collection is Painkiller (Tia Chucha Press) and is a Mentor for The Poetry Project's fellowship program, Emerge Surface Be.

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PATRICIA SPEARS JONES is an African-American poet, playwright, editor and activist. Her most recent book is A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems. Her work is widely anthologized. She is Poets & Writers 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize winner. She is the organizer of American Poets Congress. She has taught at Adelphi University and CUNY. She lives in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.

The Brooklyn Song

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Patricia Spears Jones is author of A Lucent Fire: New & Selected Poems and nine other poetry publications. She is an editor, literary curator, anthologist, cultural critic, and playwright. She is an Emeritus Fellow at the Black Earth Institute and organizer of the American Poets Congress. She was the 2020 Louis H Rubin Writer-in-Resident at Hollins University. Originally from Arkansas, she calls Brooklyn home.

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Patricia Spears Jones is an African-American poet, playwright, writer and cultural activist. Her fifth full-length collection, The Beloved Community, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press and A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems (White Pine Press) continues to find readers around the globe.

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Patricia Spears Jones is the author of seven collections, most recently the chapbook Living in the Love Economy (Overpass Books, 2014) and A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems (White Pine Press), Fall 2015.