Brookdale Community College proudly welcomes acclaimed poet Patricia Smith, a 2025 National Book Award Finalist, for an evening of poetry and conversation on Wednesday, December 3, at 7:00 p.m. in the Student Life Center, 2nd Floor, Navesink Room III, at the Lincroft campus. Parking is available in Lots 6 and 7.
Smith, the award-winning author of ten collections of poetry, will read from and discuss her newly released book, The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems.
An inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement, Smith is one of the most celebrated poets of her generation. Her nine previous books include Unshuttered and Incendiary Art, which was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and winner of the 2018 Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a 2018 NAACP Image Award. Her other acclaimed works include Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and Blood Dazzler, a 2008 National Book Award Finalist.
A Guggenheim Fellow, National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, and finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, Smith is also a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam. She currently serves as a professor of creative writing at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts and was formerly a distinguished professor at the City University of New York. She resides in New Jersey.
In The Intentions of Thunder, Smith gathers the essential works from across her storied career into one sweeping volume. The collection offers a rapturous ode to life, traversing the redeeming landscape of pain, confronting the revelations of history, and embracing the joyous possibilities of the future. With her signature voice, lyrical, meditative, and volcanic, Smith’s poetry continues to affirm the profound necessity of art in understanding the human experience.
This event is free and open to the public. For more information on Brookdale’s Visiting Writers Series, visit www.brookdalecc.edu/visitingwriters.
(Photo credit of author: Sandro Miller)