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Black, Poured Directly into the Wound

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“[Smith’s] uncanny ear and powerfully empathic imagination bring to life Black figures . . . Readers will find themselves forever changed by Smith’s spirited voice.”

— Publisher's Weekly starred review for The Intentions of Thunder

“The Intentions of Thunder is much like its author: abundant, brilliant, and unprecedented. Each book’s selections are introduced in rhythmic vignettes, which add surity to the impression that as time went on, poetry’s possibilities multiplied because Smith multiplied them.”

— Poetry Northwest

“This is an affecting, lyrical work of empathy and imagination complemented by stunning images.”

— Publisher's Weekly starred review for Unshuttered

“With tender precision, Smith’s exquisite photo album elucidates our past and steers us toward a more conscious and ethical future.”

— Booklist starred review for Unshuttered

“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.”

— Walter Mosley

“Her work is always timely, powerful, necessary, and at turns heartbreaking.”

— Natasha Trethewey

“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.”

— Harvard Review

Patricia Smith is the author of ten books of poetry, including The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scribner 2025); Unshuttered; Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson. Her other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty, Close to Death, Big Towns Big Talk, Life According to Motown; the children's book Janna and the Kings and the history Africans in America, a companion book to the award-winning PBS series.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, BOMB, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House and in Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. She co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology—New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir. Her contribution to that volume, “When They Are Done With Us,” was awarded the Robert L. Fish Award for best debut short story from the Mystery Writers of America and was published in Best American Mystery Stories.

Smith is a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, an inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and Academy of American Poets Chancellor and a member of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. She is also a Guggenheim fellow, a Civitellian, a finalist for the Neustadt Prize, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history.

Smith 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.

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