Patricia Smith, recipient of the Ruth Lilly Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, is the author of Unshuttered; Incendiary Art (winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, the LA Times Book Prize, the NAACP Image Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize); Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets); Blood Dazzler (a National Book Award finalist); Africans in America, companion volume to the award-winning PBS series, and the children’s book Janna and the Kings. Her work has been published in the anthologies Best American Poetry, Best American Essays and Best American Mystery Stories. Smith as been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry from the Sewanee Review, residencies at the Macdowell Colony and Yaddo, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is also a 4-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. Smith is a professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, a former Distinguished Professor for the City University of New York, an Academy of American Poets Chancellor and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.