Patricia smith biography poet
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In February 2023, Smith served as Guest Editor of the Poem-a-Day series. to celebrate Smith College’s annual Cromwell Day. Followed by a conversation led by students in Melissa Parrish’s ENG 303 class. Livestream also available on the BDPC YouTube page.
BIO
Patricia Smith is the author of ten books of poetry, includingThe Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scribner 2025), winner of the National Book Award for Poetry; Unshuttered; Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the2018 Pulitzer Prize;Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson. Her other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty, Close to Death, Big Towns Big Talk, Life According to Motown; the children's book Janna and the Kingsand the history Africans in America, a companion book to the award-winning PBS series.
She lives in Monmouth County, New Jersey. In January 2023, Smith was elected to become a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Patricia Smith
Author of nine critically acclaimed books of poetry, and the 2021 recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement, Patricia Smith’s career spans decades and genres.
The publication of The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scribner, 2025) marks a major milestone in American literature, one that gathers the poet’s essential work and captures Smith’s ever-evolving literary legacy. She is a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, and a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow.
Every book is better than the last.” As with Smith’s 2023 collection of poems, Unshuttered (TriQuarterly, 2023), a collection fueled by wide-ranging lyricism and bold, dramatic monologues created from the poet’s personal collection of 19th- and 20th-century photo portraits of Black subjects, her poems give rise to questions around acts of witness, the viewer’s gaze, and the possibilities of redemption and joy.
Smith is a 2022 inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and an NAACP Image Award.
In poems propelled by voice and verve, she moves through the urbanscapes of Chicago and Detroit—conjuring first love and Motown with equal fervor. In 2010, a dance/theater production based on Blood Dazzler was staged at Harlem Stage in New York.
Author photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths.
Patricia Smith
Patrica Smithis the author of eight books of poetry, including Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson.
She is also a Guggenheim fellow, a Civitellian, a finalist for the Neustadt Prize, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history.
Smith is a professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and a former Distinguished Professor for the City University of New York.
Her contribution to that volume, “When They Are Done With Us,” was awarded the Robert L. Fish Award for best debut short story from the Mystery Writers of America and was published in Best American Mystery Stories. Books will be sold and a signing will follow. She is a professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, a former Distinguished Professor for the City University of New York.
Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, BOMB, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House and in Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. And we, her spellbound audience, follow in her sonic wake, grateful to be part of stories so alive with detail and urgent with anguish and purpose.
Smith’s poems have been published in many anthologies, including The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (Random House, 2021), edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones; 100 Best African American Poems: A Black Poetry Collection (Sourcebooks/ MediaFusion, 2010), edited by Nikki Giovanni; The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006), edited by Arnold Rampersad and Hilary Herbold; American Voices (McGraw-Hill, 2005); The Spoken Word Revolution: Slam, Hip-hop & the Poetry of a New Generation (Sourcebooks/MediaFusion, 2003); and Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam (Three Rivers Press, 2001).
She co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology—New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir. In 2023, Smith was the recipient of the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.
Smith has written and performed two one-woman plays, one of which was produced by Derek Walcott’s Trinidad Theater Workshop.
Smith is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Patricia Smith
Patricia Smith is a poet, teacher, and performance artist.
Smith is a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, an inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and Academy of American Poets Chancellor and a member of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.
She is a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, making her the most successful poet in the competition’s history, and a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. She is the author of Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scribner, 2025), winner of the National Book Award and long-listed for the PEN/Voelcker Award; Unshuttered (Northwestern University Press, 2023); Incendiary Art (Northwestern University Press, 2017), winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the 2017 LosAngeles Times Book Award in Poetry; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012), winner of the 2013 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, given for the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States each year; Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008), which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award; Teahouse of the Almighty (Coffee House Press, 2006), a 2005 National Poetry Series selection; Close to Death (Zoland Books, 1993); Big Towns, Big Talk (Zoland Books, 1992), which won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award; and Life According to Motown (Tía Chucha Press, 1991).
Of Smith’s award-winning book, judge Gregory Orr wrote,
With equal parts art, attitude, and heart, Patricia Smith’s Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah braids together personal narrative and a collective cultural journey.