Patricia Smith is the author of ten books of poetry, including The Intentions of Thunder, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry; Incendiary Art, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and an NAACP Image Award, and a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist.
Her work has been published widely, including in The Best American Poetry and The Best American Essays. Her short story “When They Are Done with Us” won the Robert L. Fish Memorial Award from the Mystery Writers of America and was published in The 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, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neustadt 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 and a former distinguished professor at the City University of New York. She is currently at work on her first novel and a collection of short stories.
selected bibliography
The Intentions of Thunder (2025)
Unshuttered (2023)
Incendiary Art (2017)
Blood Dazzler (2008)
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