Patricia Smith, recepient of the Ruth Lilly Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, is the author of Incendiary Art (Northwestern University Press, 2017), winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and the NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House, 2012), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Blood Dazzler (Coffee House, 2008), a National Book Award finalist. Her next book is Unshuttered (Northwestern University Press, 2022). Smith is a visiting professor at Princeton University, and a distinguished professor for the City University of New York.