Patricia Smith, professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, has received the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry for her collection The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scribner, 2025). Presented annually by the National Book Foundation, the National Book Awards honor the best literature published in the United States, with one award each for fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people’s literature.
Professor Smith’s award-winning collection features poems from her previously published collections and new poems that traverse every facet of life, redeeming the landscape of pain, confronting the frightening revelations of history, and disclosing the joyous possibilities of the future. In addition to The Intentions of Thunder, Professor Smith is the author of nine other poetry collections, the children’s book Janna and the Kings (Lee & Low Books, 2003), and Africans in America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998) – a companion book to the award-winning PBS documentary of the same name. She is currently working on her first novel and a second children’s picture book.
Alongside her work at Princeton, Professor Smith is an instructor for Cave Canem and the Vermont College of Fine Arts’ post-graduate writing program. She was elected chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2023 and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Earlier in her career, she was a distinguished professor at the City University of New York.