Patricia Smith
“Words are muscle. They may seem otherwise, like they just sit on a page doing nothing worthwhile, but I’m constantly astonished by what a well-turned stanza can accomplish.”
(c) Beowulf Sheehan
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“This is an affecting, lyrical work of empathy and imagination complemented by stunning images.”
“With tender precision, Smith’s exquisite photo album elucidates our past and steers us toward a more conscious and ethical future.”
“Patricia Smith is a masterful poet, performer, and pundit. And while her chosen field is the form and grace of language, her gift to the world that orbits the Black experience is truth.”
“Her work is always timely, powerful, necessary, and at turns heartbreaking.”
“In an age of inconvenient “truths” and alternative facts, the fierce empathy and blazing truth of Incendiary Art has never been more necessary. These poems demand a reckoning.”
Patricia Smith is the award-winning author of eight critically acclaimed books of poetry, including Unshuttered (Triquarterly Books, 2023); Incendiary Art (Triquarterly Books, 2017), winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, 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; Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008), a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow (CityFiles Press, 2015), a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson. Her other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty (Coffee House Press, 2006), Big Towns Big Talk (Zoland Books, 2002), Close to Death (Zoland Books, 1998), and Life According to Motown (Tia Chucha, 1991); the children's book Janna and the Kings (Lee & Low, 2013); and the history Africans in America (Mariner, 1999), a companion book to the award-winning PBS series. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Tin House as well as Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, and Best American Mystery Stories. She co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology—New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (University of Arkansas Press, 2017), and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir (Akashic Books, 2012).
Writing about Incendiary Art, Publishers Weekly praised Smith’s “razor-sharp linguistic sensibilities that give her scenes a cinematic flair and her lines a momentum that buoys their emotional weight.” A master of poetic forms from her Motown crown of sonnets to elegant ghazals, Smith’s poetry fearlessly engages with America’s continuous war on black bodies: “All I want is for someone to pick up Incendiary Art or pick up Blood Dazzler and say, that’s right, this is happening. That’s what I want. Maybe it won’t last long, but for the moment they’re reading those poems I want them to be thoroughly involved in what they’re reading.”
Smith is a Guggenheim fellow, a Civitellian, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neustadt Prize, a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, a former fellow at both Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, 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, a former Distinguished Professor for the City University of New York, an Academy of American Poets Chancellor, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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(c) Beowulf Sheehan
(c) Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Unshuttered
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Incendiary Art
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Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah
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Blood Dazzler
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Teahouse of the Almighty
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