Patricia Spears Jones is a poet, educator, cultural activist and anthologist. She is the recipient of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize and author of
The Beloved Community and A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems. In addition to three other full-length collections and five chapbooks, her forthcoming book, The Devil’s Wife Considers, will be published by The Song Cave in 2025.
In 2023, Jones was appointed New York State Poet for 2023-25 and received the Walt Whitman Citation. In 2024, she was awarded a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She co-edited 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 work has been widely anthologized, appearing in Best American Poetry 2023; 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 Vox Populi, Prairie Schooner, Paterson Literary Review, 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 featured in Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry; The Whiskey of Our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience and Change Agent; as well as in The Black Scholar, Bomb, Mosaic and The Writers Chronicle. Her work has also been archived for “Harriet” at the Poetry Foundation, The Poetry Project Newsletter; Rumpus and The Writers Chronicle.
Jones has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Goethe-Institut, the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. The Museum of Modern Art commissioned her poem, “Lave,” for its Poetry Suite, which accompanied the exhibition Jacob Lawrence: The Migrations Series.
Her theatrical work includes two plays commissioned and premiered by Mabou Mines: Mother, with music by Carter Burwell, and Song for New York: What Women Do When Men Sit Knitting, with music by Lisa Gutkin. Both plays were re-staged as part of the Mabou Mines 50th Anniversary Festival in 2022.
Jones has also performed with composer and violinist Jason Hwang, who has set several of her poems to music, as well as with Ras Moshe Burnett and Luke Stewart. She collaborated with Lenora Champagne and Cindy Carr on the performance work Women in Research in the 1980s and in 2024, collaborated with internationally acclaimed Cuban artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons on Procession: A Walk for Radical Love and Unity in 2024.
As a curator, Jones has shaped literary programming as program coordinator for the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and for the WORDS Sunday series in Brooklyn. She also guest-curated for the Center for Book Arts. Jones co-hosted Open House, a radio program sponsored by Poets House with Cornelius Eady, with interviews archived at Poets House. Additionally, she has performed at arts and literary venues as well as colleges and universities across the United States.
Jones has served as a juror for literary contests, including the Fordham University POL series, Barrow Street, and the James Laughlin Award for the Poetry Society of America. She has also served on several panels for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs and has been a keynote speaker for arts and literary organizations nationwide.
Her teaching experience includes positions at Barnard College, Adelphi University and Hunter College. She was also the Louis D. Rubin Jr. Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University. Jones has led workshops at the Fine Arts Work Center, Community of Writers, Hurston/Wright Foundation, Poets House, Truro Center for the Arts and the Poetry Project.
Jones has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; Yaddo; the Millay Colony; the Robert Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, Florida; and the BAU Institute at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. She is an Emeritus Fellow of the Black Earth Institute and an organizer of the American Poets Congress.
Richard Ekman is President Emeritus of the Council of Independent Colleges, the national organization for small and mid-sized independent
colleges and universities in the US. Previously, he served as senior program officer of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and secretary of the Foundation, vice president of Atlantic Philanthropies, and director—successively—of two divisions of the National Endowment for the Humanities: Research Programs and Education Programs. He was vice president and dean of Hiram College, where he also taught in the History Department.
Currently, Ekman is a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education and holds several leadership roles. He is vice chair of the Board of Directors of College-in-Three Exchange, counsel to Academic Search, special advisor to The Registry for College and University Presidents, senior advisor to Academic Innovators, and fellow of the TIAA Institute. He is also a member of the governing boards of SAGE Scholars, Project Pericles and Emeriti Retirement Health Solutions, as well as an advisory board member for the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
Ekman has chaired the boards of several organizations, including the Council of Harvard’s Graduate School Alumni Association, Project Pericles, the American Academic Leadership Institute, Academic Search and the Higher Education Research and Development Institute. Additionally, he has served on the governing boards of the American Council on Education and the Foundation for Independent Higher Education. His advisory roles have included positions on the boards of Johns Hopkins University Press, Louisiana State University Press, the Hellenic Center, Villa I Tatti and the Harvard Board of Overseers Committee to Visit the University Library.
He is co-author and editor, with Richard Quandt, of Technology and Scholarly Communication (University of California Press) and has written several short articles for Inside Higher Ed, Chronicle of Higher Education, Change Magazine, University Business, Carnegie Reporter, Washington Post and other publications.
Ekman earned his A.B. and Ph.D. degrees in the history of American civilization from Harvard University. His contributions to higher education have been recognized with the President’s Medal of Hood College, the W.E.B DuBois Medal of Harvard University, and several honorary degrees.
For more information about Hartwick’s commencement ceremony, visit the website.
