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Incendiary Art confronts the tyranny against the black male body and the tenacious grief of the mothers of murdered African American men. Dynamic sequences, including a compelling chronicle of the devastating murder of Emmett Till, serve as a backdrop for present-day racial calamities and calls for resistance. With impassioned eloquence and a sharpened focus on incidents of national mayhem and mourning, Patricia Smith reinvents the role of witness with an incendiary fusion of forms, including prose poems, ghazals, sestinas, and sonnets. This phenomenal, visionary book addresses what is frightening, and what is revelatory, about history now.
2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
2018 NAACP Image Award
Finalist 2018 Pulitzer Prize
Finalist Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Patricia Smith is the author of ten books of poetry, including The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scribner, USA, 2025; Bloodaxe Books, UK, May 2026). Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry 2025 in the US, this draws upon previous collections including Unshuttered (2023); Incendiary Art (Triquarterly, USA, 2017; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2019), winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (2008), a National Book Award finalist; Teahouse of the Almighty (2006); Close to Death(1993); Big Towns Big Talk (1992); and Life According to Motown (1991). Her other books include Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson; the children's book Janna and the Kings and the history Africans in America, a companion book to the award-winning PBS series. She co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology – New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir.
She is a Guggenheim fellow, a Civitellian, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neustadt Prize, a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, a former fellow at both Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. She is a professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and a former Distinguished Professor for the City University of New York.
Patricia Smith was the subject of the BBC Radio 4 feature Patricia Smith: Gwendolyn's Heir broadcast in 2020.