Spears Jones News Today

Honoring one of our own.

Poet and playwright Patricia Spears Jones will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award in May from the Porter Fund, an organization supporting the literary arts in Arkansas.

Poet and playwright Patricia Spears Jones will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award in May from the Porter Fund, an organization supporting the literary arts in Arkansas.

The opening line of Patricia Spears Jones’s elegy for Nicaraguan-Salvadoran poet and journalist Claribel Alegría, who died in 2018, envisions a poet who “marked her days with rage & love.” Alegría is thus a model for Spears Jones’s fifth collection, The Beloved Community, which is similarly animated by such “rage and love,” as the poet navigates with grace and grief the “blood, blame, and curses” (“Fred Hampton Born This Day”) of Am...