Poetry & Conversation with Patricia Spears Jones, Peter Covino, & E.J. Antonio (IN PERSON)

Join us IN PERSON at HVWC on Sunday, April 14, at 4 PM ET to hear poetry and conversation with Patricia Spears Jones, Peter Covino, & E.J. Antonio.

Patricia Spears Jones is a poet, playwright, anthologist, educator, and cultural activist. She is the winner of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers and the author of A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems. 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. Patricia Spears Jones edited THINK: Poems for Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Day Hatand 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. Patricia Spears Jones 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.

On her latest poetry collection, The Beloved Community (Copper Canyon Press, September 2023):

“A world where music and brains are allowed to co-exist with instinct, where the lyrics and the literal may dwell without eyeing the other with suspicion.” — Cornelius Eady

Peter Covino is a prizewinning author of four books: two full-length poetry collections: Cut Off the Ears of Winter, and The Right Place to Jump, both from W. Michigan UP New Issues, and a co- edited collection of essays about Italian American culture, among others. He is also a well-published scholarly writer who writes about contemporary poetics, ethnic and working-class culture, and queer studies. His poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poet’s Poem-a-day, the American Poetry Review, the Paris Review, and the Yale Review among many others.

On The Right Place to Jump (New Issues, 2012):

“If Frank O’Hara had lived to chronicle the post 9/11 decade, he might have written these wonderfully funny, sad, heartbreaking, jaunty, and always delightfully accurate poems by Peter Covino. The Right Place to Jump is unique in its immediacy, the tonal range of its love poems and elegies, its ability to draw the reader into the bitter-sweet daily round of the “missed-numbed decade.” Who else would have begun a poem (“Broken Kingdom”) with the advice, “Always check expiration dates”? Here is a poet who so readily laughs at himself that we cannot help sharing in the fun—and the pain.”— Marjorie Perloff

E.J. Antonio received fellowships in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Hurston/Wright Foundation, and the Cave Canem Foundation. She’s appeared as a featured reader and performer at venues in the NY tri-state area, including Arts Westchester; the Stone; the Hobart Festival of Women Writers, The Vision Festival, Langston Hughes House, the Blue Door Art Gallery, the Untermyer Park Arts Center, and the David Rockefeller Creative Arts Center at the Pocantico Center. Her work has been published in various journals, magazines, and anthologies, including: the Encyclopedia Project, African Voices Literary Magazine, Black Renaissance Noire, The Mom Egg, Killens Review of Arts & Letters, Taint Taint Taint Magazine, About Place Journal, and arriving at a shoreline an anthology . E.J. is the author of two chapbooks, Every Child Knows (Premier Poets Chapbook Series 2007) and Solstice (Red Glass Books, 2013), and a solo jazz poetry cd Rituals in the marrow: Recipe for a jam session. E.J. is a founding Board Member of the non-profit Arts organization One Breath Rising, and a founding member of the improvisation group, The Jazz & Poetry Choir Collective, which released its debut cd We Were Here in April 2020.

On her solo cd, Rituals in the marrow: Recipe for a jam session:

“Every poem builds, dismantles, or lies its lazy ass down. And all three of these are dangerous to someone. Everyone who writes poetry is interested in danger whether they know it or not.” — Jericho Brown

“I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future — the timelessness of the rocks and the hills —  all the people who have existed there — I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape —  the loneliness of it — the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn’t show.” — Andrew Wyeth