We're delighted to share The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems by Patricia Smith as our Special Commendation for Summer 2026.
Patricia Smith is the author of ten books of poetry. Her most recent, The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe), won the National Book Award for Poetry and the 2026 NAACP Image Award for Poetry and was recently announced as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her other notable works include Unshuttered; Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the 2018 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; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson.
Smith is a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, an inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and Academy of American Poets Chancellor and a member of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. She is also a Guggenheim fellow, a Civitellian, a finalist for the Neustadt Prize, and a four-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 and a former Distinguished Professor for the City University of New York.
Image credit: Sandro Miller