Poets & Writers Theater

In this Button Poetry video, Patricia Smith reads her poem “An All-Purpose Product,” which appears in her award-winning collection Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012), for the 2016 Get Lit Classic Slam in Los Angeles.

“What surprised me was that I discovered I enjoyed it sometimes: writing prose.” In this Books Are Magic event, Shane McCrae speaks with Patricia Smith and reads from his debut memoir, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping (Scribner, 2023), which is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“It’s difficult to describe how I felt about the pictures I collected, how I continued to forge a link with them that I didn’t particularly understand.” Patricia Smith speaks about the photographs she collected over the course of twenty years that inspired her latest collection, Unshuttered (Northwestern University Press, 2023), for this recording of the Academy of American Poets’ 2023 Blaney Lecture. For more on Smith, read her conversation with Tyehimba Jess in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I am so happy to tell people, and to have learned myself, that a passion for the writing is all you really need.” Patricia Smith reads from her new collection, Unshuttered (TriQuarterly Books, 2023), and speaks about continuing to challenge herself with her writing for this Poetry.LA interview with host and poet Lynne Thompson. For more on Smith, read “Unshuttered: Patricia Smith’s Journey Into the Aperture of History” by Tyehimba Jess in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“More people are turning to [poetry] for truth,” says Patricia Smith in this 2018 interview with Lauren K. Alleyne for The Fight & The Fiddle, the quarterly online publication of the Furious Flower Poetry Center. For more on Smith, read “Unshuttered: Patricia Smith’s Journey Into the Aperture of History” by Tyehimba Jess in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Is it okay to begin with the obvious? I am full of stones,” reads Ada Limón from “The Magnificent Frigatebird,” a poem from her latest collection, The Hurting Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2022), in this reading and conversation with Patricia Smith at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn.

“Who knew our pudgy American dream was so combustible?” Patricia Smith reads a poem from her seventh poetry collection, Incendiary Art (TriQuarterly Books, 2017), which is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

The Academy of American Poets asked Randall Mann, Marilyn Hacker, D. Nurkse, Matt Rasmussen, Patricia Smith, and Brenda Hillman to talk about the most important letters they've received.