Laureates in Conversation: Patricia Spears Jones and Jacqueline Woodson

Featuring

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  Patricia Spears Jones

  Patricia Spears Jones

  Patricia Spears Jones (New York State Poet Laureate 2023-2025) is a poet, playwright, anthologist, educator, and cultural activist. She is the winner of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers. Her most recent book is The Beloved Community (Copper Canyon, 2023). She is also the author of A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems, Painkiller: Poems, Femme du Monde: Poems, and The Weather That Kills. Her work is anthologized in African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song; Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin; and BAX 2016: Best American Experimental Writing. Her poems have been published in the New Yorker, the Brooklyn Rail, the Ocean State Review, Ms., and Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts. She edited THINK: Poems for Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Day Hat and Ordinary Women: An Anthology of New York City Women. Mabou Mines commissioned and produced her plays Mother and Song for New York: What Women Do While Men Sit Knitting. She also co-curated the Wednesday Night Series for St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project. She has taught graduate and undergraduate creative writing at Hollins University, Adelphi University, Hunter College, and Barnard College. She leads poetry workshops for the 92nd Street Y, The Workroom, Hugo House, Community of Writers, Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, Gemini Ink, and Brooklyn Poets. She organizes the American Poets Congress and is a Senior Fellow Emeritus of the Black Earth Institute. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

  
  

  Photo Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

  
  
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  Jacqueline Woodson

  Jacqueline Woodson

  Jacqueline Woodson (New York State Author Laureate 2023-2025) is the recipient of a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and the 2018 Children’s Literature Legacy Award. She was the 2018–2019 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, and in 2015, she was named the Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. She received the 2014 National Book Award for her New York Times bestselling memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, which also received the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, the NAACP Image Award and a Sibert Honor. She also wrote the adult books Red at the Bone, a New York Times bestseller, and Another Brooklyn, a 2016 National Book Award finalist. She is the author of dozens of award-winning books for young adults, middle graders and children; among her many accolades, she is a four-time Newbery Honor winner, a four-time National Book Award finalist, and a two-time Coretta Scott King Award winner. Her books include Remember Us, Before the Ever After, The World Belonged to Us, New York Times bestsellers The Day You Begin, The Year We Learned to Fly, and Harbor Me; The Other Side; Each Kindness; Caldecott Honor book Coming On Home Soon; Newbery Honor winners Feathers, Show Way, and After Tupac and D Foster; and Miracle’s Boys, which received the LA Times Book Prize and the Coretta Scott King Award. Jacqueline is also a recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement for her contributions to young adult literature and a two-time winner of the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award.

  
  

  Photo Credit: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

  
  
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  Mahogany L. Browne

  Mahogany L. Browne

  Mahogany L. Browne is a California-born, Brooklyn-based writer, organizer, mentor, and curator. She has published several books of poetry and facilitates performance poetry and writing workshops throughout the country. She is an Agnes Gund, Cave Canem, AIR Serenbe, Poets House, Rauschenberg fellow, and the current artistic director of Urban Word NYC. Her previous books for young readers include Woke Baby and Black Girl Magic.

  
  

  Photo Credit: Daniel Terna