Virtual Reading by Visiting Poet Patricia Smith

To celebrate National Poetry Month, the GCU Department of English invites you to a virtual reading featuring distinguished Visiting Poet Patricia Smith. Join us on Thursday, April 1, from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. on Zoom. The event will include a reading, student-led interview, and audience Q&A. Click here to register for your virtual ticket.

Patricia Smith’s poetry makes an alliance of the page and the spoken word to magnify the power of language. Smith delivers truth, demands justice, witnesses grief, and celebrates living in lines that carry, cut, and carve out space for attention. The personal is political; the political is personal. And there is always a body living in the lines that we can inhabit, visit, or mourn—something with hips and breath to hold onto or hold out for. Whether it be in personifying weather as Hurricane Katrina in Blood Dazzler, embodying the experience of migration in Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, or investigating suffering through the elements of fire, water, and air in Incendiary Art, Patricia Smith composes voices that speak out, call in, and carry you to a place of radical compassion. Please, join us in honoring her work.

Currently, Patricia Smith is a Distinguished Professor for the City University of New York and an instructor in the M.F.A. program at Sierra Nevada University and in the Vermont College of Fine Arts Post-Graduate Residency Program. Patricia Smith is the author of eight volumes of poetry, recipient of the 2013 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of Poets, 2013 Phillis Wheatley Book Award winner,  2014 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize from the Library of Congress, 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and 2008 National Book Award Finalist, 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 record-setting four-time national poetry slam champion as well as a feature on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and the film Slamnation. To check out her published work and performance videos, visit her official website: http://www.wordwoman.ws/about