Wednesday

Stephanie Brown is the author of two collections of poetry, Domestic Interior (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008) and Allegory of the Supermarket (University of Georgia Press, 1999). She was awarded an NEA Fellowship in Poetry in 2001 and the Margaret Bridgman Fellowship in Poetry at the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference in 2009. She has taught creative writing at University of California, Irvine and at the University of Redlands, but has primarily made her living as a librarian and library manager. Her poems have been selected for four editions of the annual anthology, The Best American Poetry (Scribner’s) and her poetry and essays have been anthologized in American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon, 2000), Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner’s, 2003), The Grand Permission: New Writing about Motherhood and Poetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2003) and others. Her work has also been published in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Slope, Pool, ZYZZYVA, LIT, and others. She helped organize the Casa Romantica Reading Series for poets and fiction writers in San Clemente, California from 2004-2010. She is a regional branch manager for OC Public Libraries in southern California.

Patricia Spears Jones is an award-winning African-American poet, editor, playwright, teacher and former Program Coordinator at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church.  Her poetry collections are Painkiller, Femme du Monde and The Weather That Kills and the chapbooks Mythologizing Always and Repuestas!. Her work is anthologized in Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days; Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry; Bowery Women: Poems; broken land: Poems of Brooklyn; Poetry After 911; Blood & Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard; Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology; Sisterfire; and Best American Poetry, 2000. Poems, interviews, reviews and commentary in www.kwelijournal.com, Bomb, Callaloo, Reverie, Downtown Brooklyn, Fifth Wednesday, Barrow Street, The Oxford American, The Poetry Project Newsletter, African Voices, PMS#8; Black Renaissance Noire, Court Green, nocturne, Black Issues Book Review, Essence, The Brooklyn Rail, The Southampton Review; TriQuarterly,  and  www.tribes.org.  Two plays were commissioned and produced by Mabou Mines: ‘Mother’ in 1994 and Song for New York: What Women Do When Men Sit Knitting in 2007. She edited and contributed to Think:  Poems for Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Day Hat. Her website is www.psjones.com.