Today's show features Patricia Smith, whose The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems, won the National Book Award for Poetry last fall. It’s a tremendous book, gathering a generous selection of her previous nine volumes along with the new pieces.
Patricia Smith's previous books include Unshuttered; Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, among many others, and in Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. She co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology—New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir. Smith is a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, an inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and Academy of American Poets Chancellor and a member of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. She is also a Guggenheim fellow, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history.
A note of caution: Patricia Smith’s second reading contains language that may be difficult for some. Please use discretion.
Pick up a copy of The Intentions of Thunder here.
Read more about Smith here.
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