Patricia Spears Jones is poet, playwright, anthologist, educator and cultural activist is the winner of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers. She is author of A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems and 10 other poetry collections and in anthologies such as Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin; BAX: Best American Experimental Writing, 2016: 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI, Best of Small Presses; and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. Poems recently published in The New Yorker; Ms. Muse, Plume, Persimmon Tree, The Cortland Review and CUTTHROAT: A Journal of the Arts. She edited THINK: Poems for Aretha Franklin Inauguration Day Hat and Ordinary Women: An Anthology of New York City Women Poets. She has received grants from the NEA, NYFA and awards from the Barbara Deming Money for Women Fund and other prizes. She has been in a Fellow at the Rauschenberg Residency, Virginia Center for the Arts, Yaddo, and Camargo Foundation via the BAU Institute, Cassis, France and appointed the Louis D. Rubin Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University. She has taught at Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, Truro Center for the Arts, Fine Arts Work Center, The Gathering, Poets House, Gemini Ink, Wild Seeds Conference for Medgar Evers College, Brooklyn Poets and at Adelphi University, CUNY, and Barnard College. She is organizer of the American Poets Congress and is a Senior Fellow Emeritus of the Black Earth Institute.