Audience – Readers

Friday, Jan. 24 | 12:30-2 p.m.
Memorial Chapel

The annual University Convocation shares ideas and provides insight on contemporary issues. Invited by the faculty Convocations and Commencement Committee, this address is delivered by individuals of high accomplishment in their respective field.

This year’s Convocation speaker is Patricia Smith: poet, spoken-word performer, playwright, author, and writing teacher.

About Patricia Smith

Patricia Smith is the award-winning author of eight critically acclaimed books of poetry, including Unshuttered (Triquarterly Books, 2023); Incendiary Art (Triquarterly Books, 2017), winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008), a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow (CityFiles Press, 2015), a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson. Her other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty (Coffee House Press, 2006), Big Towns Big Talk (Zoland Books, 2002), Close to Death (Zoland Books, 1998), and Life According to Motown (Tia Chucha, 1991); the children’s book Janna and the Kings (Lee & Low, 2013); and the history Africans in America (Mariner, 1999), a companion book to the award-winning PBS series. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Tin House as well as Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, and Best American Mystery Stories. She co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology—New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (University of Arkansas Press, 2017), and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir (Akashic Books, 2012).

Smith is a Guggenheim fellow, a Civitellian, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neustadt Prize, a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, a former fellow at both Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. She is a professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, a former Distinguished Professor for the City University of New York, an Academy of American Poets Chancellor, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.