Poetry Path: Patricia Smith

Patricia Smith is a poet, performer, and teacher. Her most recent collection, Incendiary Art (Northwestern University Press, 2017), won the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry, the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize. She is a four-time National Poetry Slam champion, a 2017 Civitella Ranieri fellow, a 2014 Guggenheim fellow, a 2012 Yaddo and MacDowell fellow, and a two-time Pushcart Prize winner. Smith teaches poetry, fiction, and African-American literature at the College of Staten Island, in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College, and is a Cave Canem faculty member.

Patricia Smith, excerpt from “Practice Standing Unleashed and Clean” commissioned by Academy of American Poets for Imagine Your Parks (Ellis Island, 2016). Reprinted with the permission of the author.

The Poetry Path is made possible through a partnership with Battery Park City Authority, partners in design and fabrication of the Poetry Path, with additional support from our Outreach Partner, Goldman Sachs. Special thanks to the Arthur F. and Alice E. Adams Foundation for funding the Poetry Path planning process, and to the Marcia Brady Tucker Foundation for supporting Poetry Path educational initiatives for youth and children.