An Evening of Poetry with Patricia Smith in Conversation with Chigozie Obioma | Lanier Reading Series

What happens when a poet enters into conversation with her own earlier selves?

Please join the audience for this evening with acclaimed poet Patricia Smith, the 2025 National Book Award winner for The Intentions of Thunder, a 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry finalist, and recipient of the 2026 NAACP Image Award for Poetry.

In The Intentions of Thunder, Smith boldly reimagines the “new and selected” collection, entering into dialogue with her earlier poems and transforming a career retrospective into an engagement with her earlier selves. The result is a deeply reflective and inventive look at a life in poetry—and the ways our past selves continue to speak to who we are becoming.

Smith will read from The Intentions of Thunder before joining Chigozie Obioma, Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor, for a wide-ranging conversation about poetry, language, creativity, and the evolution of a poet's voice. A Q&A with the audience will follow the reading and conversation. The event is made possible with support from the Athens-Clarke County Library and the Willson Center. 

Copies of The Intentions of Thunder will be available for purchase from GHOST before the reading. A first-come, first-served queue for book signing will be available before the program begins. If you'd like to have a book signed, we encourage you to arrive early.

As the Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor of English, Professor Chigozie Obioma brings writers of various genres to campus to speak and share their work with the university and the greater Athens community. The series is aimed to showcase writers with international reach and recognition who can inspire conversations around topics pertinent to their work. Learn more about the Lanier Reading Series here. 

Patricia Smith is the author of ten books of poetry, including The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scribner 2025), winner of the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry, finalist for the 2026 Pulitzer Prize, and winner of the 2026 NAACP Image Award for Poetry; 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 the2018 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. Her other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty, Close to Death, Big Towns Big Talk, Life According to Motown; the children's book Janna and the Kings and the history Africans in America, a companion book to the award-winning PBS series. 

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, BOMB, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House and in Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. She co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology—New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir. Her contribution to that volume, “When They Are Done With Us,” was awarded the Robert L. Fish Award for best debut short story from the Mystery Writers of America and was published in Best American Mystery Stories. 

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.