Patricia Smith

Patricia Smith (she/her) has been called “a testament to the power of words to change lives.” She is the author of Unshuttered (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Incendiary Art (Northwestern University Press, 2017), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, an NAACP Image Award, and finalist for both the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House, 2012), which won the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (Coffee House, 2008), a chronicle of the human and environmental cost of Hurricane Katrina which was nominated for a National Book Award; and Teahouse of the Almighty (Coffee House, 2005), a National Poetry Series selection. In 2021 she was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Smith has also collaborated with award-winning photographer Sandro Miller on the books Crowns (forthcoming, fall 2021) and Death in the Desert (2021), and with the photographer Michael Abramson on the book Gotta Go Gotta Flow: Life, Love, and Lust on Chicago’s South Side (2015). 

Her work has appeared in Poetry magazine, the Paris Review, the New York Times, TriQuarterly, Tin House, the Washington Post, and in both Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. Smith’s contribution to the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir, which she edited, won the Robert L. Fish Award from the Mystery Writers of America for the best debut story of the year and was chosen for Best American Mystery Stories 2013. Smith also penned the critically acclaimed history Africans in America (1999) and the award-winning children’s book Janna and the Kings (2003). 

Blood Dazzler was adapted as a dance/theater production, performed in residence at the Harlem Stage, and the play Life According to Motown, featuring a selection of Smith’s poems, was produced at Boston Playwrights Theater and the Trinidad Theater Workshop under the direction of Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott.

Smith is a a 2016 Civitellian, a 2014 Guggenheim fellow, a 2012 fellow at both MacDowell and Yaddo, a two-time Pushcart Prize winner, recipient of a Lannan fellowship and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. 

Smith is a distinguished professor of English for the City University of New York and a lecturer in creative writing at Princeton University. Her next poetry book, upcoming in 2022, will combine dramatic monologues with 19th century photos of African Americans from her extensive private collection. She is currently working on her first novel.