College of Staten Island Professor Patricia Smith was recently featured in two news sources, the Columbia Daily Tribune and The Guardian.
A poem by Smith, an Associate Professor in the Department of English and author of Incendiary Art (Northwestern University Press, 2017), was published in the Columbia Daily Tribune.
Smith commented about the poem, “After the unrest in Ferguson following the murder of Michael Brown, I heard many versions of this sentiment: ‘It’s so stupid for them to burn down their own neighborhoods.’ I thought back on my own first neighborhood in Chicago, torched to its bones after the King assassination, and how everything — before and after that moment — smelled on the verge of ignition. I wanted to explore the ways our streets, our homes and our bodies strain toward fire.”
Read the poem in the Columbia Daily Tribune online.
Smith was also featured in The Guardian in the article “Poetic justice: the rise of brilliant women writing in dark times” by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett. In the commentary, Cosslett suggests that perhaps, “… in order to understand the transformation we are seeing in public discourse, you might turn to Skinhead by Patricia Smith instead of a newspaper.” Cosslett refers to the poem Skinhead by Smith, which when read aloud “… packs an emotional punch, but also allows us to hear voices and see faces that have long been excluded from the canon of what is considered ‘good poetry’, whether for reasons of race, or class, or gender, or sexuality.”
Read the article in The Guardian.
