Incendiary Art

About Patricia Smith

Patricia Smith is the author of eight books of poetry most recently Incendiary Art (Triquarterly USA 2017; Bloodaxe Books UK 2019) 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. Her other collections include 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. She co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir. She is a Guggenheim fellow a Civitellian a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient a finalist for the Neustadt Prize a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize a former fellow at both Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam the most successful poet in the competitions history. Patricia is a professor at the College of Staten Island and in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College as well as an instructor at the annual VONA residency and in the Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Residency Program.