Patricia Smith is a performance poet and the author of eight collections of poetry, including Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and a 2018 NAACP Image Award; 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 Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House, and in the anthologies The Best American Poetry, The Best American Essays, and The Best American Mystery Stories. She co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology—New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir. Smith is a professor at the College of Staten Island and in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College, as well as an instructor at the annual VONA residency and in the Vermont College of Fine Arts Post-Graduate Residency Program. Her *AGNI *poem “Skinhead” is among her most well-known. (updated 2/2018)

Smith’s eighth collection, *Incendiary Art, *was reviewed in AGNI Online by Christian Wessels. 

Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths