2021 Massachusetts Poetry Festival

Please join us for this headline reading featuring Ariana Reines and Patricia Spears Jones, sponsored by The Shipman Agency. Opening reading by Jennifer Martelli.

Link to recording: https://salemstate.zoom.us/rec/share/ut-mTqEs_ljSy0gDnz7Yu8wX8bqLvQqwq1q8BaURDzs56HfGq-dIvaotyPQlFOw1.GgR1IZVgNDxK3p_9?startTime=1621184084000

Arkansas born and raised; resident of New York City for more than four decades, Patricia Spears Jones is the recipient of The Jackson Poetry Prize, one the most prestigious awards for American Poets via Poets & Writers, Inc. The $50,000 prize is among the most substantial given to an American poet and is designed to provide what all poets need: time and encouragement to write. She is the eleventh winner. In language that is simultaneously sensuous, wise-cracking, explicit, and rollicking, Spears Jones describes a world rich in beauty and longing, with pain tempered always by joy.

Spears Jones was named by Essence as one of its “40 Poets They Love” in 2010. She is the author of the poetry collections Painkiller and Femme du Monde: Poems from Tia Chucha Press;  The Weather That Kills from Coffee House Press; and five chapbooks including Living in the Love Economy. Her fourth collection, A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems is out from White Pine Press (White Pine Press Distinguished Poets series) and features her 2016 Pushcart Prize-winning poem, “Etta James at the Audubon Ballroom”. She was a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Prize from the Poetry Society of America and the Paterson Prize from the Passaic County Community College. Her work is widely anthologized. In 2015 she received a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Award for her memoir in progress.

Ariana Reines is an award-winning poet, playwright, and translator. Her most recent book of poetry is A Sand Book (Tin House, 2019), which was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her other books include Tiffany’s Poems (Song Cave, 2015); Ramayana (Song Cave, 2015); The Origin of the World (Semiotext(e), 2014); Beyond Relief (Belladonna*, 2013); Thursday (Spork Press, 2012); Mercury (Fence Books, 2011); Coeur de Lion (Fence Books, 2007); and The Cow (Fence Books, 2006). Her poems have been anthologized in Corrected Slogans (Triple Canopy, 2013); Miscellaneous Uncatalogued Materials (Triple Canopy, 2011); Against Expression (Northwestern University Press, 2011); and Gurlesque (Saturnalia, 2010). Reines has been described as “one of the crucial voices of her generation” by Michael Silverblatt on NPR’s Bookworm. In 2020, she won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She’s been a MacDowell Fellow, has judged the National Poetry Series, and writes regularly for ArtForum.

Reines’s first play Telephone (2009) was performed at the Cherry Lane Theater and received two Obie Awards. A re-imagining of its second act was featured as part of the Guggenheim’s Works+Process series in 2009, and the script was published in Play: A Journal of Plays in 2010. Telephone was published by Wonder in 2018. Reines’s translations include a version of Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare (2009); Jean-Luc Hennig’s The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore (2009); and Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials Toward a Theory of the Young-Girl (2012).

Performances Reines has created include Miss St’s Hieroglyphic Suffering for the Guggenheim (2009); The Origin of the World for Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London (2012); Mortal Kombat for Le Mouvement Biel/Bienne; Galerie TPW Toronto; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2014); and more. Public Space, a 2017 sculpture collaboration with Oscar Tuazon, was shown at Stuart Shave/Modern Art London.
In an interview with The White Review, Reines was asked about the connection between writing the occult and writing female desire:

Writing is a transformative act and writing the occult, which I interpret as writing what’s invisible, or apparently invisible, is inevitably connected to writing my desire as a woman. Since the beginning of my career I’ve been haunted by the old mode of writing, which I think of as ‘righting’ – seeking redemption, somehow, by rendering past events into art; into fiction, into vision, into some form of intellectual lucidity that could somehow free me from the shit of the real. This is how the old dudes used to do it, and it’s not without its value. But what fascinates me is writing’s relationship to the future. Every book I’ve written has radically transformed my life. It has materially altered my lifestyle, brought me into contact with new friends and lovers, artworks and countries, ideas and vibrations I had neither the guts nor the imagination to visualize in advance.

Reines has taught at Columbia University, NYU, The New School, Tufts, and the European Graduate School, where she studied literature, performance, and philosophy. She has also been Visiting Critic in the Department of Sculpture at Yale in 2009 she was the Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at the University of California-Berkeley, the youngest poet to ever hold that position. She is currently a student at Harvard Divinity School. Since 2012, she has worked privately with clients through her astrology practice, Lazy Eye Haver.

Jennifer Martelli is the author of My Tarantella (Bordighera Press), awarded an Honorable Mention from the Italian-American Studies Association, selected as a 2019 “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and named as a finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. Her chapbook, After Bird, was the winner of the Grey Book Press open reading, 2016. Her work has appeared in Thrush, Verse Daily, Iron Horse Review (winner, Photo Finish contest), The Sycamore Review, Cream City Review, The Bitter Oleander, and Poetry. Jennifer Martelli has twice received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for her poetry. She is co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review and co-curates the Italian-American Writers Series.

About The Shipman Agency, Inc:
The Shipman Agency offers complete literary services to writers at all stages of their careers. While our primary focus is representing leading authors and thinkers for speaking engagements, we're pleased to offer the services of literary agent Annie DeWitt, independent book publicist Preeya Dave, and Mike Levine, editorial consultant. We’ve also added The Work Room, online classes + seminars taught by our clients. Our mission remains the same: to provide clients, venues, emerging writers + students with the best possible experience, and to represent authors who are on the cutting edge of contemporary thinking about culture and the world.