Patricia Smith

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Poetry at Bennington welcomes Patricia Smith for a public reading of her poetry.

Patricia Smith is the author of nine critically acclaimed books of poetry, including Unshuttered (Triquarterly Books, 2023), and Incendiary Art (Triquarterly Books, 2017), which won the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and the LA Times Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House, 2012), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Blood Dazzler (Coffee House, 2008), a National Book Award finalist. She is the 2021 recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement, presented by the Poetry Foundation, and a 2022 inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. A Guggenheim and NEA fellow, Smith was a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poem in the competition’s history. She is a professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.

Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan