POETS @ PACE
Patricia Spears Jones & Mónica de la Torre
Tuesday, November 11, 6-8 p.m., Bianco Room
The poets Patricia Spears Jones and Mónica de la Torre will give the fall 2014 reading in the Poets @ Pace series. The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place from 6-8 p.m. in the Bianco Room, Level B, One Pace Plaza (entrance at 3 Spruce St.). It will include a Q & A, book signing, and refreshments. Poets @ Pace, which brings important poets to the Pace NYC campus each semester, is organized by Pace Poet-in-Residence Charles North and sponsored by the Office of the Provost.
Patricia Spears Jones has received poetry awards from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, NY Community Trust, Goethe Institute, New York Foundation for the Arts, and National Endowment for the Arts. She has published three poetry collections and four chapbooks, and two of her plays were commissioned and produced by Mabou Mines, the acclaimed experimental theater company. Jones’s poetry has been anthologized in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry and Best American Poetry, and she edited Think: Poems for Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Day Hat and Ordinary Women: An Anthology of Poetry by New York City Women. She has served on literature panels at the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, Associated Writing Programs, Hollins College, and The New Museum of Contemporary Art. A Senior Fellow at the Black Earth Institute, she teaches at La Guardia Community College.
Mónica de la Torre was born and raised in Mexico City. She came to the U.S. in 1993 on a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Columbia, and she has published poetry in both Spanish and English. Her first book in English, Talk Shows, came out in 2007; Public Domain was published in 2008. She co-edited Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry, as well as other multilingual anthologies, and she has translated numerous Spanish-language poets including Poems by Gerardo Deniz. In addition to poetry, she has been very much involved in the arts. Currently Senior Editor at the art magazine Bomb, she has herself collaborated with a number of artists. About her work, the poet Mary Jo Bang wrote: “Rather than relying on false certainties and pat recollections, de la Torre offers up a fine-tuned sense of the ridiculous, a world of tomfool capers with a hint of the macabre.”