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 Los Angeles 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). Smith is a winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2021 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement. She is a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, making her the most successful poet in the competition’s history, and a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. In 2023, Smith was the recipient of the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.  From https://poets.org