Patricia Smith
Patricia Smith is known worldwide as one of the few performance poets whose work also translates to the written page.
Patricia Smith, internationally renowned as a performance poet, is four-time national individual champion of the notorious and wildly popular poetry slam, an energized competition where poets are judged on the content and performance of their work. She is also regarded as one of the few performance poets whose work translates effortlessly to the page. Blood Dazzler, a collection due in September 2008, chronicles Hurricane Katrina as it transforms into a full-blown mistress of destruction. Smith’s collection, Teahouse of the Almighty, was chosen by Ed Sanders for the 2005 National Poetry Series. Her three previous books of poetry are Close to Death Big Towns, Big Talk and Life According to Motown. Smith's poems have been published in The Paris Review, and numerous other literary journals and anthologies. She has won the prestigious Carl Sandburg Award, and, in 2006, was inducted into the International Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent. Smith is a staff instructor at Cave Canem, the groundbreaking retreat for African-American writers. She was the McEver Chair in Writing at Georgia Tech University in 2004, and has taught poetry and memoir writing at New York’s Writers Voice.