Patricia Smith is the author of ten books of poetry, including The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scriber, 2025), winner of the 2025 National Book Award and the NAACP Image Award; Unshuttered (Northwestern 2023), Incendiary Art (Northwestern 2017), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, the LA Times Book Prize, the NAACP Image Award and 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; and Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008), a National Book Award finalist. Her work has been published widely, including in Best American Poetry and Best American Essays; her short story “When They Are Done With Us” won the Robert Fish Award from the Mystery Writers of America and was featured in 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, an National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neudstadt Prize, a former fellow at Civitella Ranieri, Yaddo and MacDowell, and 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 for the City University of New York. Currently, she is at work on her first novel.