Patricia Smith, our CentreTerm Grissom Artist-in-Residence, is the author of nine books, including Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Should Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson. She was the 2021 recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement, presented by the Poetry Foundation, and a 2022 inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Her other books include Life According to Motown; the children's book Janna and the Kings and the history Africans in America, a companion book to the award-winning PBS series. She is also a Guggenheim fellow, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neustadt Prize, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition's history.
This convocation is open to the public.