Patricia Smith

Profile

Patricia Smith is the author of nine books of poetry, including The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems(Scriber, 2025), Unshuttered (Northwestern 2023), Incendiary Art (Northwestern 2017), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, the LA Times Book Prize, the NAACP Image Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008), a National Book Award finalist. Her work has been published widely, including in Best American Poetry and Best American Essays; her short story “When They Are Done with Us” won the Robert Fish Award from the Mystery Writers of America and was featured in Best American Mystery Stories. 

Smith is a 2024 inductee into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, as well as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a chancellor in the Academy of American Poets, a Guggenheim fellow, an National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neudstadt Prize, a former fellow at Civitella Ranieri, Yaddo and MacDowell, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. 

 She is a professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, as well as a former distinguished professor for the City University of New York. Currently, she is at work on her first novel and a collection of short stories.