Patricia Smith is the author of nine books of poetry, including The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scribner, 2025), winner of the 2025 National Book Award and the NAACP Image Award; Unshuttered (Northwestern, 2023); Incendiary Art (Northwestern, 2017), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the NAACP Image Award, and a 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 appeared 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 and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She is also 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 at the City University of New York. She is currently at work on her first novel.