Patricia Smith has been called “a testament to the power of words to change lives.” She is the author of eight books of poetry, including Incendiary Art(2017), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a finalist for both the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), which won the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (2008), a chronicle of the human and environmental cost of Hurricane Katrina which was nominated for a National Book Award; and Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection published by Coffee House Press. In 2021 she was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Source: PoetryFoundation.org