Danez Smith | |
---|---|
Born | St. Paul, Minnesota |
Alma mater | |
Genre | Poetry |
Literary movement | Dark Noise Collective |
Notable works | [insert] Boy Don't Call Us Dead: Poems Homie |
Notable awards | Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry Kate Tufts Discovery Award Forward Prize |
Website | |
www |
Danez Smith is a poet, writer and performer from St. Paul, Minnesota. [1] [2] They are queer, non-binary and HIV-positive. They are the author of the poetry collections [insert] Boy and Don't Call Us Dead: Poems, both of which have received multiple awards. [3] Their most recent poetry collection Homie was published on January 21, 2020. [4]
Smith was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, [5] and attended Saint Paul Central High School. [6] They grew up with their mother and grandparents in the Selby Neighborhood. [7] Their family is from Mississippi and Georgia. [8]
Smith has said that they struggled with reading up until the third grade. [7] A teacher told them that being able to read would allow them to read video-game magazines, which inspired Smith. [7]
Smith was a First Wave Urban Arts Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, graduating with a BA in 2012. [9] [10]
Smith is a founding member of Dark Noise Collective [11] with Fatimah Asghar, Franny Choi, Nate Marshall, Aaron Samuels, and Jamila Woods. [12]
With Jamila Woods, Smith joined Macklemore for a performance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in February, 2016. [13] Their writing has been published in Poetry (magazine) and Ploughshares . [5] On March 30, 2017, Smith was the inaugural guest of the Alexander Lawrence Posey Speaker Series at the University of Central Oklahoma. [14]
Smith is the author of three books. [insert] Boy won the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, [15] with jurist Chase Twitchell describing Smith's poetry as "remarkable for its nervy, surprising, morally urgent poems." [16] [insert] Boy was also selected as a Boston Globe Best Poetry Book in 2014. [17] Smith's second book, Don't Call Us Dead: Poems, was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for poetry. [18] Their third book, Homie, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the 2021 NAACP Image Award for Poetry. [4] Smith is also the author of two chapbooks, hands on ya knees (2013, Penmanship Books) and black movie (2015, Button Poetry), winner of the Button Poetry Prize.
Smith has twice been a finalist in Individual World Poetry Slam. [16] They were a finalist in 2011 [19] and placed second in 2014. [20]
With Franny Choi, Smith is co-host of the poetry podcast VS from the Poetry Foundation. [21]
Smith won a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts grant. [22]
In 2018, Smith's sonnet sequence "summer, somewhere" received the inaugural Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America. [23] At age 29, Smith also became the youngest recipient of the £10,000 Forward Prize for best poetry collection, as Don't Call Us Dead beat out works by U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith and former Forward winner Vahni Capildeo. [24] Smith serves on the board of directors for the D.C.-based poetry non-profit Split This Rock. [25]
In 2020, Smith published a third poetry collection called Homie. [26] [27] Homie won the 2021 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. [28]
Smith is genderqueer and uses they/them pronouns. [24]
Kevin Young is an American poet and the director of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture since 2021. Author of 11 books and editor of eight others, Young previously served as Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. A winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a finalist for the National Book Award for his 2003 collection Jelly Roll: A Blues, Young was Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and curator of Emory's Raymond Danowski Poetry Library. In March 2017, Young was named poetry editor of The New Yorker.
The Forward Prizes for Poetry are major British awards for poetry, presented annually at a public ceremony in London. They were founded in 1992 by William Sieghart with the aim of celebrating excellence in poetry and increasing its audience. The prizes do this by identifying and honouring talent: collections published in the UK and Ireland over the course of the previous year are eligible, as are single poems nominated by journal editors or prize organisers. Each year, works shortlisted for the prizes – plus those highly commended by the judges – are collected in the Forward Book of Poetry.
Patricia Smith is an American poet, spoken-word performer, playwright, author, writing teacher, and former journalist. She has published poems in literary magazines and journals including TriQuarterly, Poetry, The Paris Review, Tin House, and in anthologies including American Voices and The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry. She is on the faculties of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Sierra Nevada University.
Mark Doty is an American poet and memoirist best known for his work My Alexandria. He was the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008.
Claudia Rankine is an American poet, essayist, playwright and the editor of several anthologies. She is the author of five volumes of poetry, two plays and various essays.
Carl Phillips is an American writer and poet. He is a Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2023, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020.
Tracy K. Smith is an American poet and educator. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She has published five collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume Life on Mars. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was published in 2015.
Graywolf Press is an independent, non-profit publisher located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Graywolf Press publishes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
Carmen Giménez, also known as Carmen Giménez Smith, is an American poet, writer, and editor.
Cave Canem Foundation is an American 501(c)(3) organization founded in 1996 by poets Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady to remedy the underrepresentation and isolation of African-American poets in Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs and writing workshops across the United States. It is based in Brooklyn, New York.
Natalie Diaz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Mojave American poet, language activist, former professional basketball player, and educator. She is enrolled in the Gila River Indian Community and identifies as Akimel O'odham. She is currently an Associate Professor at Arizona State University.
Jamila Woods is a Chicago-based American singer, songwriter and poet. Woods is a graduate of St. Ignatius College Prep and Brown University, where she received a BA in Africana Studies and Theater & Performance Studies. Her work focuses on themes of Black ancestry, Black feminism, and Black identity, with recurring emphases on self-love and the City of Chicago.
Layli Long Soldier is an Oglala Lakota poet, writer, feminist, artist, and activist.
Mai Der Vang is a Hmong American poet.
Fatimah Asghar is a South Asian American poet, director and screenwriter. Co-creator and writer for the Emmy-nominated webseries Brown Girls, their work has appeared in Poetry, Gulf Coast, BuzzFeed Reader, The Margins, The Offing, Academy of American Poets, and other publications.
Donika Kelly is an American poet and academic, who is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa, specializing in poetry writing and gender studies in contemporary American literature. She is the author of the chapbook Aviarium, published with fivehundred places in 2017, and the full-length collections Bestiary and The Renunciations.
The Four Quartets Prize is an award of the Poetry Society of America, presented annually since 2018 in partnership with the T.S. Eliot Foundation. It is "first and foremost a celebration of the multi-part poem, which includes entire volumes composed of a unified sequence as well as novels in verse and book-length verse narratives."
Franny Choi is an American writer, poet and playwright.
Sjohnna McCray was an American poet. He was the author of Rapture, winner of the Walt Whitman award of the Academy of American Poets in 2015.
Jenny Xie is an American poet and educator. She is the author of Eye Level, winner of the 2018 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the National Book Award in 2018, and of The Rupture Tense, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2022.
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