Patricia Smith The Award-Winning Poet: All You Need To Know
Who Is Patricia Smith? The Award-Winning Poet Redefining American Literature
Congratulations are in order for Poet Patricia Smith. On Nov. 19, the esteemed poet and author received one of literature’s highest honors: the National Book Award in Poetry for her newest collection, The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems, according to NPR.
The 70-year-old poet triumphed in a competitive field that included Gabrielle Calvocoressi (The New Economy), Cathy Linh Che (Becoming Ghost), Tiana Clark (Scorched Earth), and Richard Siken (I Do Know Some Thing).
A Landmark Collection
Released Sept. 30, The Intentions of Thunder gathers both new work and selected poems from across Smith’s extraordinary career. It showcases, as the Poetry Foundation describes, a “masterful performer and poet of voices too little heard,” according to the book’s publisher, Simon and Schuster. The collection surveys a vast terrain—pain, history, joy, and the charged uncertainties of the future—delivered with Smith’s signature emotional clarity and daring lyricism.
The book is presented as “a rapturous ode to life,” moving with “careful yet vaulting” energy through past, present, and possibility. These poems, the publisher writes, ultimately form “a profound testament to the necessity of poetry—all the careful witness, embodied experience, and bristling pleasure that it bestows—and of Smith’s necessary voice.”
Lyrical yet sly, meditative yet volcanic, the collection reaffirms her status as one of the nation’s most indispensable literary figures.
From Journalist to Award-Winning Poet
Patricia Smith’s ascent to the upper ranks of American poetry is as remarkable as her work itself. According to the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, she began her professional life as a journalist and did not initially intend to become a poet at all. She once recounted that she was invited to a poetry event at a blues bar and agreed to attend simply to “drink and laugh at the poets.” Instead, with Gwendolyn Brooks in the audience, she found herself spellbound. What followed was an unstoppable rise through Chicago’s spoken-word scene.
She became deeply entrenched in the Chicago slam poetry community, winning several national titles with her unique, honest, raw, and impactful storytelling.
“I think the early days of performance and poetry competitions, particularly in the hotbed of Chicago, just nixed any pesky boundaries when it came to creation,” Smith told poet Lynn Thompson during an interview, recalling the creative freedom of the era. “The goal was to disappear ourselves so that there was no boundary between the poet and the audience.”
Her transition to page poetry began in the ’90s, when Luis Rodriguez of Tia Chucha Press asked if she had a manuscript. Her now-famous advice: “When someone asks you if you have a manuscript, say yes, and then go home and worry about it because you don’t have one.” That manuscript became her debut collection Life According to Motown, launching a prolific publication streak that showcased her ability to captivate readers as powerfully on the page as she did onstage.
A Career of Range, Witness, and Radical Empathy
Across decades, Smith has built a body of work that confronts American history, personal memory, and overlooked stories with unflinching honesty. Her poems are radical not for doctrinal declarations but for the way they compel readers to witness alongside her.
As she once explained about her process: “A lot of the research is: What has no one heard? What has no one read? What’s a detail that might be on the periphery of the story? That’s a great entry point. You’re trying to upend expectations for the poem, from both the reader and from yourself.”
This philosophy has shaped the groundbreaking work that followed—Incendiary Art, Blood Dazzler, Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, and more—earning her a Pulitzer Prize finalist designation, a Kingsley Tufts Award, NAACP Image Awards, and fellowships from Guggenheim, NEA, Yaddo, and MacDowell.
Alongside writing, Patricia Smith has become a celebrated educator, teaching at City University of New York, Cave Canem, StoryStudio Chicago, and, most recently, Princeton University.
The Influence of Gwendolyn Brooks
Among Smith’s many inspirations, none looms larger than Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In an interview for Brooklyn Poets, Smith described Brooks’s transformative impact.
“I’ve read everything that Mama Gwendolyn Brooks wrote many times over, even more now that I’m beginning to delve deeper into fiction. I just love how blissfully she ignored the rules of language, how she crafted a new way to look and listen to a world I thought I was already living in,” the poet said. “When it comes to shouldering historical and psychological baggage, no one rivals the Chicago colored girl—and Gwen was one, and I am one, and—well, she crafted our soundtrack. Her work taught me to break my unflinching fix on the horizon—I was always focused on ‘getting beyond’ the space I was standing in—and to see my own self, my own neighborhood, my own people, as viable and utterly beautiful.”
A Legacy Reinforced
With The Intentions of Thunder taking home the National Book Award, Patricia Smith’s place in American letters—already towering—becomes even more firmly established. Her latest honor not only celebrates a stunning collection but also a lifetime of reshaping what poetry can do, whom it can center, and how profoundly it can speak to the world.
SEE MORE:
