Patricia Smith (poet)

For other people named Patricia Smith, see Patricia Smith (disambiguation).

Patricia Smith
Smith reading at the Library of Congress
Born	1955 (age 68–69) Chicago, Illinois
Occupation	Poet, spoken-word performer, playwright, author, writing teacher, journalist
Nationality	American
Genre	Poetry
Spouse	Bruce DeSilva

Patricia Smith (born 1955) is an American poet, spoken-word performer, playwright, author, writing teacher, and former journalist. She has published poems in literary magazines and journals including TriQuarterly, Poetry, The Paris Review, Tin House, and in anthologies including American Voices and The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry. She is on the faculties of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Sierra Nevada College.

She is a four-time individual National Poetry Slam champion and appeared in the 1996 documentary SlamNation, which followed various poetry slam teams as they competed at the 1996 National Poetry Slam in Portland, Oregon.

Patricia Smith is haled as the first African American woman to publish a weekly metro column for the Boston Globe. Her many accomplishments include a Guggenheim fellowship, acceptance as a Civitellian, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, and two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. She is a former fellow of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and she is the most successful poet of the National Poetry Slam competition. Currently, Smith is a professor at the College of Staten Island, a student in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College, and a resident in VONA and in the Vermont College of Fine Arts Post-Graduate Residency Program.  

Career

Poetry

Smith's poetry has appeared in literary journals including The Paris Review and TriQuarterly, and dozens of anthologies, including The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade.

She has read her poetry at venues including the Poets Stage in Stockholm, Urban Voices in South Africa, Rotterdam’s Poetry International Festival, the Aran Islands International Poetry and Prose Festival and on tour in Germany, Austria and Holland. In the U.S., she’s performed at the National Book Festival, Carnegie Hall, and the Dodge Poetry Festival.

The book Blood Dazzler was the basis for a dance/theater production which sold out a week-long series of performances at New York’s Harlem Stage.

A selection of Smith's poetry was produced as a one-woman play by Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott and performed at both Boston University Playwrights Theater and the historic Trinidad Theater Workshop. Another play, based on Life According to Motown, was staged by Company One Theater in Hartford, Ct., and reviewed favorably in The New York Times.

Works

As her first book, Patricia Smith published Life According to Motown in September of 1991 and now it has been republished for the 20^th anniversary edition. Like much of her poetry, this collection draws upon her roots in Chicago during the 1960s, recounting lessons learned through the hardships and glamour of Motown.  After Life According to Motown, Smith published Big Towns, Big Talks which serves as a type of sequel to its predecessor, examining life after childhood in Chicago.

In September of 1993, Smith published Close to Death, which explores black male life expectancy in relation to homicide, drug abuse, and AIDS. Smith’s poems give voice to the thousands of black males in New York City, Chicago, and Boston who have run out of options and expect to lose their lives without first given a chance to live. Publishers Weekly says, “Her acute ear for the intricacies of speech adds to the vitality of poems written in the voice of black men she encounters amid the inner-city squalor of Chicago and Boston." Her Teahouse of the Almighty is a collection of her free-verse poems on various topics such as love, family, religion, feminism, and the role of poetry. The poem “Boy Dies, Girlfriend Gets His Heart” is about an actual event where a fifteen year old boy gave his heart to his girlfriend, and in another poem, Smith discusses her views on religion and her Baptist upbringing. Many critics have praised this work, calling it a “stunning mix of sound and sense” by Diane Scharper in Library Jounral and a Publisher's Weekly critic stated that Smith is the “rarest of creatures, a charismatic slam and performance poet whose artistry truly survives on the printed page.

Another collection of her poems is Africans in America: American’s Journey through Slavery. This collection was designed to accompany a PBS series and co-authored with Charles Johnson and the WGBH Series Research Team.

Her collection titled Incendiary Art grapples with black bodies of the African American community against the backdrop of Emmett Till’s killing. This collection uses various forms of poetry such as prose, ghazels, sestinas, and sonnets.

In Gotta Go Gotta Flow, Patricia Smith combines her poems with Michael Abramson’s photography of the ‘70s in Chicago’s South Side. Donna Seman from Booklist praised this collection, saying that it is “a supremely arresting and affecting match of potent images and singing words” (“Patricia Smith”).

For Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, Smith won three awards: the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Rebekah Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, and the Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Poetry. The collection contains poems about the urban areas of Chicago and Detroit, discussing themes of first love, Motown, personal narrative, and cultural journey. Gregory Orr, judge of the 2014 Lenore Marshal Prize, said that her poems “plunge to the soul-depths of the people who inhabit them” (“Patricia Smith”).

Journalism controversy

As an editorial assistant at The Chicago Sun-Times in the late 1980s, she wrote a review of a concert that she had not attended.

She gained notoriety when The Boston Globe asked her to resign after editors discovered her metro column contained fictional characters and fabricated events in violation of journalism practice. Smith admitted to four instances of fabrications in her columns.

Awards

Poetry

Her book Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah was awarded the 2014 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Award. She is also a 2008 National Book Award finalist, winner of the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award in Poetry, the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, the National Poetry Series award, the Patterson poetry award, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Rattle poetry prize. She also won the Robert L. Fish Memorial Award for short story writing and had work selected to appear in both "Best American Poetry" and "Best American Essays." In 2006, she was inducted into the International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent, and she was the recipient of both McDowell and Yadoo fellowships. And for "Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah," she won the Lenore Marshall Prize, presented by the Academy of American Poets in recognition of "the most outstanding book of poetry" published in America the previous year.

Journalism

Smith won the Distinguished Writing Award for Commentary from the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), 1997. However, the Boston Globe returned the ASNE award and withdrew her from consideration for a Pulitzer Prize after the newspaper acknowledged that some of her columns contained fabricated people, events, and quotes.

Personal life

Smith is married to Bruce DeSilva, journalist and Edgar Award-winning author. She currently lives in Howell, New Jersey.

Bibliography

Poetry collections

• Incendiary Art: Poems poems about Emmett Till, Northwestern University Press, 2016.
• Smith, Patricia (2012). Shoulda been Jimi Savannah. Coffee House Press. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |authormask= (help)
• Blood Dazzler - poems about Hurricane Katrina, Coffee House Press, 2008, a National Book Award finalist.
• Teahouse of the Almighty - selected as a National Poetry Series winner, published in 2006 by Coffee House Press
• Close to Death - poetry, 1993, Zoland Books
• Big Towns, Big Talk - poetry, 1992, Zoland Books
• Life According to Motown - poetry, 1991, Tía Chucha Press

List of poems

Title	Year	First published	Reprinted/collected
Laugh your trouble away	2011	Smith, Patricia (Fall–Winter 2011). "Laugh your trouble away". Sugar House Review. 5. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |authormask= (help)	Smith, Patricia (2013). "Laugh your trouble away". In Henderson, Bill (ed.). The Pushcart Prize XXXVII : best of the small presses 2013. Pushcart Press. pp. 358–360. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |authormask= (help)

Non-fiction

• Africans in America - history, companion book to the PBS television series of the same name, Harcourt Brace, 1998 (co-authored with Charles Johnson)

Children's books

• Janna and the Kings - 2003, Lee & Low, winner of the New Voices Award for new children's book authors

See also

• Poetry Slam
• Journalism scandals

External links

• The Book of Voices
• Modern American Poetry: Patricia Smith
• Personal website
• The Academy of American Poets - Patricia Smith
• Patricia Smith: An American Poet