A four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, Patricia Smith was born in Chicago, Illinois, and received her BA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her collection Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008) was a finalist for the National Book Award. Incendiary Art (TriQuarterly, 2017) won the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scribner, 2025) won the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry. She received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2021. She is a professor of creative writing at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, and at Princeton University.
