Patricia Smith (poet)

rdf:langString Patricia Smith (poet)

rdf:langString Patricia Smith

rdf:langString Patricia Smith

rdf:langString Chicago, Illinois, U.S.

rdf:langString Four-time National Poetry Slam champion

rdf:langString Reading at the Library of Congress, 2013

rdf:langString Poetry

rdf:langString

rdf:langString author

rdf:langString playwright

rdf:langString journalist

rdf:langString writing teacher

rdf:langString Slam poet

rdf:langString spoken-word performer

rdf:langString 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 University. 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. Patricia Smith is hailed as the first African-American woman to publish a weekly metro column for the Boston Globe. Her many accomplishments include a Guggenheim fellowship, acceptance as a Civitellian, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, and two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. She is a former fellow of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and she is the most successful poet of the National Poetry Slam competition. Currently, Smith is a professor at the College of Staten Island, a core faculty member in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada University, and a resident in VONA and in the Vermont College of Fine Arts Post-Graduate Residency Program.