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Patricia smith (actress)
Patricia smith - wikipedia

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Patricia Smith

Mandana Chaffa praises Patricia Smith’s most recent collection Unshuttered (2023, TriQuarterly) as an “act of revivification, providing voice for those who might have otherwise been erased from history,” as Smith writes into Black consciousness via 19th century photographs of Black men, women, and children, “unreeling history to find its fierce and formidable lyric.” With sharp lyricism and bold tone suspended in dramatic monologues, Smith’s work transforms text and image into a multimedia force investigating ideas of gaze and inner life, writing, “We ache for fiction etched in black and white. Our eyes never touch. These tragic grays and bustles, mourners’ hats plopped high upon our tamed but tangled crowns, strain to disguise what yearning does with us.”

Author of of eight critically acclaimed books of poetry, Smith’s poetic career spans across decades and genre, and she is a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, and has received the 2024 Fuller Award, the 2023 Aiken Taylor Award, the 2021 Poetry Foundation Ruth Lilly P

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Patricia Smith

Patricia Smith is a poet, teacher, and performance artist. She is the author of Unshuttered (Northwestern University Press, 2023); Incendiary Art (Northwestern University Press, 2017), winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the 2017 LosAngeles Times Book Award in Poetry; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012), winner of the 2013 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, given for the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States each year; Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008), which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award; Teahouse of the Almighty (Coffee House Press, 2006), a 2005 National Poetry Series selection; Close to Death (Zoland Books, 1993); Big Towns, Big Talk (Zoland Books, 1992), which won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award; and Life According to Motown (Tía Chucha Press, 1991).

Of Smith’s award-winning book, judge Gregory Orr wrote,

With equal parts art, attitude, and heart, Patricia Smith’s Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah braids together personal narr
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Patricia Smith: Exploring Life Through the Poetry of Personas
Summary:Renowned poet and poetry slam performer Patricia Smith explores urban life and history by getting into people’s skins and speaking their words. In this powerful and inspiring keynote for NWP’s 2010 Urban Sites Network Conference, she reflects on her teaching experience and the incredible power of language to unlock an interior life.
Patricia Smith’s words aren’t like most poets’ words. Even when they’re printed on a page, they don’t just rest there, waiting to be read, content to reside in a literary journal or book.
You might say that the words on a page are just one part of Smith’s poetry, and perhaps not even the most important part, because Smith’s poetry is written with a voice in mind; it’s written to be spoken and performed—whether it’s in a poetry slam, a modern dance, a play, or a classroom.
Smith began her career in the late 1980s in her hometown, Chicago—which has been called “the cradle of poetry slam”—and she