PATRICIA SMITH is the author of 10 books of poetry, including The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scriber, 2025); Unshuttered (Northwestern); Incendiary Art (Northwestern), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the NAACP Image Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press), a National Book Award finalist. Her work has been published widely, including in Best American Poetry and Best American Essays, and her short story When They Are Done With Us won the Robert Fish Award from the Mystery Writers of America and was featured in Best American Mystery Stories. Smith is a 2024 inductee into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a chancellor in the Academy of American Poets, a Guggenheim fellow, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neudstadt Prize, a former fellow at Civitella Ranieri, Yaddo and MacDowell, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam. Currently, she is working on her first novel and a collection of short stories.