Patricia Smith is the winner of the 2021 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, an award for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Foundation. She is the author of nine books of poetry, including Unshuttered (2023), a collection of dramatic monologues accompanied by 19th-century photos of African Americans; Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry, the 2017 LA Times Book Prize, the 2018 NAACP Image Award and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and three collaborations with award-winning visual artists — Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, with Chicago photographer Michael Abramson, and the books Crowns and Death in the Desert, with Sandro Miller, twice the Lucie Foundation’s International Photographer of the Year and one of the top advertising photographers in the world.

Read her full biography on the Lewis Center for the Arts website.