Join us for a Virtual Craft Class & Reading with Patricia Spears Jones

Craft Class will run from 6:30 PM-8:30 PM EDT. Followed by a reading from 8:30 PM-8:45 PM.

Registration on Eventbrite required in order to gain access to the Zoom link.

Suggested donation to benefit the instructor: $10

All are welcome to join, with or without a donation.

Once you have registered on Eventbrite you will receive an email with the link you need to join the event on Zoom – or you can simply return to the Eventbrite page and click on “Access the event.” But you will only be able to access this AFTER you have registered.

Working Words

This workshop focuses on expanding the writer’s word choice. Poets often use a few words over and over. One way to break this pattern is to use different words–ones that have not been used. This workshop uses an exercise to generate new poems and as a tool that the students can take with them. Participants will review a prompt, write, and discuss their vocabulary choices.

Patricia Spears Jones is a poet, educator, cultural activist, anthologist, and recipient of 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize and is author of A Lucent Fire New and Selected Poems and three full-length collections and five chapbooks. She coedited the groundbreaking anthology Ordinary Women: An Anthology of New York City Women (1978) and THINK: Poems for Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Day Hat (2009). Her poems are widely anthologized, most notably in Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin: BAX: Best American Experimental Writing, 2016, WORD: An Anthology by A Gathering of Tribes, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. Jones’s poems have appeared in many print and online journals, such as the New Yorker, the Brooklyn Rail, Persimmon Tree: An Online Magazine of the Arts by Women, Cutthroat Journal, and Plume. Her essays, blogs, colloquies, and interviews have been published in the collections Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry and The Whiskey of Our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience and Change Agent; they have also appeared in print and online journals, including The Black Scholar, Bomb, Mosaic, the Harriet blog on poetryfoundation.org, Pangyrus, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Rumpus, and The Writers Chronicle. https://psjones.com