PATRICIA SMITH, POET & PERFORMER

“Reading poems like these, overflowing with life but contained by art, makes us all feel a little bit helpless. These poems are blessings that will move like white light through your veins.” —American Book Review

Internationally renowned as a performance poet, Patricia Smith 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. Indeed, the Small Press Review declares, “Smith writes the way Tina Turner sings.” Smith’s most recent collection, Teahouse of the Almighty, was chosen by Ed Sanders for the 2005 National Poetry Series, and was published by Coffee House Press in 2006. Her three previous books of poetry are, Close to Death (Zoland Books), Big Towns, Big Talk (Zoland Books), and Life According to Motown (Tia Chucha). In reviewing Close to Death for Library Journal, Louis McKee said, “…souls rage from the hellfire of the streets, and Smith effectively captures the language and urgency, the rhythms and fury.”

Smith's poems have been published in The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, AGNI and other literary journals, and in the anthologies Bum Rush the Page, The Garden Thrives, Children Remember Their Fathers, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, Aloud: Voices from Nuyorican Poets Café, Revival: Spoken Word from Lollapalooza, Unsettling America, Spirit and Flame and Power Lines. She has won the prestigious Carl Sandburg Award, as well as a literary award from the Illinois Arts Council and an honorary degree from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In 2006, she was inducted into the International Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent, putting her in the company of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Alice Walker, and others. Smith’s current poetry project is a book of poems about the emotional and physical devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina.

Patricia Smith has read and performed her work at the Poets Stage in Stockholm, Rotterdam’s Poetry International Festival, the Aran Islands International Poetry and Prose Festival, Expo 90 in Osaka, the Bahia Festival, the Sorbonne in Paris and on tour in Germany, Austria and Holland. She has also performed in a number of major American venues including Carnegie Hall, Bumbershoot, South by Southwest Music Festival, Black Roots at the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center, the Painted Bride, and on tour with Lollapalooza. She was featured in the nationally-released film “Slamnation,” and was a featured poet on the award-winning HBO series Def Poetry Jam.  Smith has shared the stage with Adrienne Rich, Rita Dove, Joyce Carol Oates, Allen Ginsburg, Walter Mosley, Ntozake Shange, Gwendolyn Brooks, Galway Kinnell and Viggo Morgensen. Smith also collaborates with musicians in order to break new ground during her performances. She frequently appears with her band Bop Thunderous, and is also a vocalist with Paradigm Shift, a stellar improvisational jazz group whose members have worked with Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis.

An author of prose as well poetry, Smith wrote Africans in America (Harcourt Brace), a chronicle of slavery in this country and the companion volume to the groundbreaking four-part PBS series. Publishers Weekly called Africans “a monumental research effort wed with fine writing…ultimately shaped by Smith’s beautiful narrative,” and Michelle Cliff of the San Jose Mercury News said, “With its vivid language and historical integrity, Africans in America is a major contribution to this country’s written history.” Smith is currently at work on Fixed on a Furious Star: The Journeys of Harriet Tubman, to be published by Crown in 2007. Her first children’s book, Janna and the Kings, a New Voices Award winner, was published in 2003 by Lee & Low, and her second, Mahina, the Mad Mad Moon was just completed. Essays were recently published in the anthologies Convictions and Rise Up Singing: Black Women Writers on Motherhood, which won an American Book Award.

Also a playwright/performer, in 2004, The Play Company in New York City produced “Professional Suicide,” a one-woman show that got its start during the summer of 2001 while Smith was writer-in-residence at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Ct. The production was directed by Tony-nominated Marion McClinton. Selections from Smith’s poetry volumes were previously adapted for the theater and presented as a solo performance piece, produced by Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott and performed at both Boston University Playwrights Theater and the historic Trinidad Theater Workshop. Another play based on Life According to Motown was staged by Company One Theater in Hartford, Connecticut.

Smith is a staff instructor at Cave Canem, the groundbreaking retreat for African-American writers, and teaches their New York regional class in Manhattan. 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. She speaks often in schools, hoping to foster a love for the energy of the written word.

ABOUT BLOOD DAZZLER (2008)
In minute-by-minute detail, Patricia Smith tracks Hurricane Katrina as it transforms into a full-blown mistress of destruction. From August 23, 2005, the day Tropical Depression Twelve developed, through August 28 when it became a Category 5 storm with its “scarlet glare fixed on the trembling crescent,” to the heartbreaking aftermath, these poems evoke the horror that unfolded in New Orleans as America watched on television. Assuming the voices of flailing politicians, the dying, their survivors, and the voice of the hurricane itself, Smith follows the woefully inadequate relief effort and stands witness to families held captive on rooftops and in the Superdome. An unforgettable reminder that poetry can still be “news that stays news,” Blood Dazzler is a necessary step toward national healing.

“She is a testament to the power of words to change lives.”
—Fitchburg MA Sentinel/Enterprise

Patricia Smith website