Patricia Spears Jones

Born and raised in Forrest City, Arkansas, poet Patricia Spears Jones was educated at Rhodes College and earned her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Art and music inform her poems, and she offers portraits of individuals in transit, engaging themes of class and social change with wry perception. Praising “the grit and blood, wit, flesh, bone, and spirit of which the poems are made” in a review of Femme Du Monde,poet Janet Hamill noted, “From the particular they move to the universal, effortlessly. From the body they dissolve into space. The world they reference is mundane. The world they reference is marvelous.” “I always think of myself as evoking the blues in my poetry, and the blues are never ‘happy’ even when they’re ecstatic,” Spears Jones explained in a 2014 interview with Rochelle Spencer for Mosaic: Literary Arts of the Diaspora. “There’s a sense of temporality of life. We’re only here for a brief time. There is only so much we can do. People have enemies and there are difficulties. And sometimes there’s great music and great sex to lighten the load.”