Join Straw Dog Writers Guild in honoring poet and activist Patricia Smith with the 2017 Abel Meeropol Social Justice Writing Award.
Patricia Smith is the author of eight books of poetry, including Incendiary Art; 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.
Ms. Smith is a Guggenheim Fellow, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. She is a professor at the College of Staten Island and in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College.
This event is free and open to the public.
Event co-sponsors:
ACLU of Massachusetts, ARISE for Social Justice, Center for New Americans, Click Workspace, David Ruggles Center for History & Education, Gateway City Arts, Green Fire Press, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University, Human Error Publishing (Great Falls Word Festival), Joel Katz & the Strange Fruit film, The Literacy Project, MA Committee Against the Death Penalty - Hampden Co. Chapter, National Lawyers Guild - Massachusetts Chapter, NorthamptonStateHospital.org, Patchwork Farm Writers Retreat, Pioneer Valley Workers Center, Poetry Center at Smith College, Rosenberg Fund for Children, Safe Passage, Sojourner Truth School for Social Change Leadership, Voices from Inside, Warren J. Plaut Charitable Trust, W.E.B. DuBois Center, University of Massachusetts - Amherst, and White Square Books