Patricia Smith

In an interview with Tony Leuzzi (a poet known for his Fib poetry and the poem "The Burning Door”"), Smith talks about how she started writing poetry. She says: "I got introduced to poetry via the stage, where there isn’t a place to crawl behind the language." Smith talks about her first Chicago slam poetry night where she performed her poems for the first time. This scene became Smith's social circle as well as her recreational exercise, but after performing for a while, people began to view Smith's poems as literature rather than just performance. These people challenged Smith to make a commitment to her writing. Smith discusses how she had written four poetry books before admitted into an MFA program. Though the MFA program taught her the “bones and muscles of language,” the poet claims she established herself as a poet and her content way before her academic studies. Smith responds to Leuzzi's question about attending an MFA program later in life by affirming the freedom she had in academics because she was already an established and published poet, so Smith did not need to go after grants and awards or university validation.

"Incendiary Art," a 2017 collection of poems published by Northwestern University Press won the 2018 Kingsley Tufts (Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards) poetry award and the 2018 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry. The collection also won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry.

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. Speaking in 2015 of her subsequent career, the Globe editor who discovered her fabrications, Walter V. Robinson, noted: "The fact of the matter is that in life, for all of us, we are judged very much by how we bounce back from adversity.... In that sense, I’m really heartened by what's happened in her life."

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."

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. 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. And "Incendiary Art" won the NAAACP Image Award and was named a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

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.

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.

In September 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: Diane Scharper in Library Journal called it a "stunning mix of sound and sense and a Publishers Weekly critic stated: "Smith appears to be that rarest of creatures, a charismatic slam and performance poet whose artistry truly survives on the printed page."

As her first book, Patricia Smith published Life According to Motown in September 1991 and now it has been republished for the 20th 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.

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

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.

Patricia Smith was born in 1955 in Chicago, Illinois. She attended Southern Illinois University and Northwestern University.