NY Times Profiles: Patricia Smith

The New York Times profiles College of Staten Island English Department Professor, successful poet, and "fallen journalist," Patricia Smith, who is the recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry. More:

Sometimes, the words come to her on the Garden State Parkway or on the Outerbridge Crossing, snippets of verse that capture a flash of light, an eruption of color, a piercing cry.

She recites the words aloud, burning them into memory, as she steps out of the faculty parking lot at the College of Staten Island and climbs the stairs to her second-floor office.

She recites the words because she wants to hear how they hit the air, to feel how they roll off the tongue, to know if they are discordant shards or melodious fragments of a sonorous whole.

Where’s that girl going? Past slant sag
porches, pea shuck, twangy box guitars
begging under purple dayfall.

She is Patricia Smith, Staten Island’s literary sensation, a poet, an English professor and a star on the national stage. Last month, she won the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Library of Congress to luminaries such as James Merrill, Louise Glück and Mark Strand. In April, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry.

It is all the more extraordinary if you consider her story. [...]

Learn more at NYT.