Award-winning poet Patricia Smith read to students from her work as the spring’s Bingham Visiting Writer. Ms. Smith has written six books of poetry, including Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), which won the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (2008), a chronicle of the human and environmental cost of Hurricane Katrina, which was nominated for a National Book Award; and Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection. Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Paris Review, the New York Times, and in both Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. She is a 2014 Guggenheim fellow; a 2012 fellow at both MacDowell and Yaddo; and a two-time Pushcart Prize winner. She is at work now on a biography of Harriet Tubman. Ms. Smith is a professor at the College of Staten Island and an instructor in the M.F.A. program at Sierra Nevada College.
“I consider myself a storyteller. Witnessing goes hand in hand with that. In order to witness, I have to find an entry point. Once I find that entry point, which may be unexpected, I start to shed myself. You can see that in my choice of syntax. I try to become that person, that event, in that place as much as possible.”