Patricia Spears Jones named recipient of Porter Fund’s Lifetime Achievement Award

Patricia Spears Jones

Forrest Metropolis native Patricia Spears Jones is quickly to obtain the Porter Fund’s Lifetime Achievement Award, a distinction handed out each 5 years to an Arkansas author with a “substantial and acknowledged physique of labor.” Previous recipients of the award, which comes with a $5,000 prize, embody Donald Harington in 2004, Miller Williams in 2009, Charles Portis in 2014 and Jo McDougall in 2019, making Spears Jones the primary individual of coloration to be given the honour. 

“I’m glad to have my work as a poet, playwright, anthologist, and cultural activist appreciated in my residence state by The Porter Fund,” Spears Jones mentioned in a press launch. “What a present to the state to have this concentrate on the literature of dwelling writers particularly when a lot about studying, writing, and considering is underneath assault by those that are not looking for us to learn, write or suppose for ourselves.”

The creator of five poetry collections — most just lately 2023’s “The Beloved Neighborhood” and 2015’s “A Lucent Fireplace: New and Chosen Poems” — Spears Jones gained the Jackson Poetry Prize in 2017 and is at present the State Poet of New York, the place she’s lived because the Nineteen Seventies.

For a pattern of her work, head to The New Yorker or the Academy of American Poets. I’m notably keen on “Dancer,” which includes simply three stanzas:

The person with the black feather tattoo pares this house
Between fantasy and the reminiscence of a person’s carved
Torso, designed for stroking and celebration.

At present the solar’s brightness is like that lover’s kiss,
Great within the current and higher in reminiscence.

A reminiscence that brings me again to that black feather’s
Flutter. Stars dazzle in another a part of this world
The place the solar has set and the moon illuminates
Swans diving into voluminous waters.

An award ceremony for Spears Jones will probably be held on Might 16 within the Nice Corridor on the Clinton Presidential Middle. For extra data and tickets, e-mail Werner Trieschmann at wtrieschmann@sbcglobal.net.

Based in 1984, the Porter Fund additionally provides out an annual prize, which has been awarded to 40 poets, novelists, non-fiction writers and playwrights with a connection to Arkansas. A full checklist of earlier winners could be discovered here.

The put up Patricia Spears Jones named recipient of Porter Fund’s Lifetime Achievement Award appeared first on Arkansas Times.