Patricia Smith

At 69 years old, Patricia Smith physical status not available right now. We will update Patricia Smith 's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Smith's poetry has appeared in literary journals including The Paris Review and TriQuarterly, and dozens of anthologies, including The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade.

She has read her poetry at venues including the Poets Stage in Stockholm, Urban Voices in South Africa, Rotterdam's Poetry International Festival, the Aran Islands International Poetry and Prose Festival and on tour in Germany, Austria and Holland. In the U.S., she's performed at the National Book Festival, Carnegie Hall, and the Dodge Poetry Festival.

The book Blood Dazzler was the basis for a dance/theater production which sold out a week-long series of performances at New York's Harlem Stage.

A selection of Smith's poetry was produced as a one-woman play 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, Ct., and reviewed favorably in The New York Times.

In an interview with Tony Leuzzi (a poet known for his Fib poetry and the poem "The Burning Door”"), Smith talks about how she started writing poetry. She says: "I got introduced to poetry via the stage, where there isn’t a place to crawl behind the language." Smith talks about her first Chicago slam poetry night where she performed her poems for the first time. This scene became Smith's social circle as well as her recreational exercise, but after performing for a while, people began to view Smith's poems as literature rather than just performance. These people challenged Smith to make a commitment to her writing. Smith discusses how she had written four poetry books before admitted into an MFA program. Though the MFA program taught her the “bones and muscles of language,” the poet claims she established herself as a poet and her content way before her academic studies. Smith responds to Leuzzi's question about attending an MFA program later in life by affirming the freedom she had in academics because she was already an established and published poet, so Smith did not need to go after grants and awards or university validation.

In addition to her poetry and journalism, Patricia Smith is also a performer in two one-woman plays and in a one-woman show called Professional Suicide. In Priya Parmar and Bryonn Bain's article "Spoken Word and Hip Hop: The Power of Urban Art and Culture", the authors argue that Smith along with Taylor Mali and Saul Williams ushered in a new era of poetry in the film documentary SlamNation. Smith has contributed to various notable anthologies including Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, Short Fuse: The Global Anthology of New Fusion Poetry, Bum Rush the Page, The Oxford Anthology of African American Poetry and Pushcart Prize XXXII: Best of the Small Presses.

In addition to her personal works, she also offers individual and group rates for poetry instruction from kindergarteners to senior citizens..

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