Patricia Smith
Visiting Poet
Author of nine critically acclaimed books of poetry, and the 2021 recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement, Patricia Smith’s career spans decades and genres. The publication of The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scribner, 2025) marks a major milestone in American literature, one that gathers the poet’s essential work and captures Smith’s ever-evolving literary legacy. In the words of Danez Smith, “Patricia Smith is the greatest living poet. Every book is better than the last.” As with Smith’s 2023 collection of poems, Unshuttered (TriQuarterly, 2023), a collection fueled by wide-ranging lyricism and bold, dramatic monologues created from the poet’s personal collection of 19th- and 20th-century photo portraits of Black subjects, her poems give rise to questions around acts of witness, the viewer’s gaze, and the possibilities of redemption and joy.
Smith is a 2022 inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and an NAACP Image Award. She is a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, and a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow. 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. “There’s no one like Patricia Smith,” writes Mark Doty, “and her bold, necessary poems light up the American twentieth century in all its song and sorrow.”
Smith’s reading will take place in Weinstein Auditorium in Wright Hall on Tuesday, November 11 at 7 p.m. to celebrate Smith College’s annual Cromwell Day. Followed by a conversation led by students in Melissa Parrish’s ENG 303 class. Books will be sold and a signing will follow. Free & open to the public. Livestream also available on the BDPC YouTube page.
Select Poems
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Nap Unleashed (with photos by Sandro Miller)