Exeter, NH (April 2, 2009)—On Wednesday, April 22, at 7:30 p.m., Patricia Smith, poet/author, teacher and performance artist, will be the second poet in Phillips Exeter Academy Library’s Lamont Poetry Program for 2008–09. The reading will be held in the Assembly Hall, located on the second floor of the Academy Building on Front Street. The event is free and open to the public.

Smith has won numerous literary awards and citations, and was a 2008 National Book Award Finalist. She is also a former faculty member of the Cave Canem, a Bruce McEver Visiting Chair in Writing at Georgia Tech University, and a writer-in-residence at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. In 2006, Smith was inducted into the National Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African descent. Her most recently published work, entitled Blood Dazzler, chronicles the minute-to-minute devastation and havoc wreaked by Hurricane Katrina.

A four-time individual champion in the National Poetry Slam—the most successful slammer in the history of the competition—Smith has also been featured on HBO’s “Def Poetry Jam,” and has performed three one-woman plays; one produced by Nobel Prize-winner, Derek Walcott. She is also the author of Africans in America, a companion volume to the PBS documentary. In its review, Publishers Weekly described the book as “a monumental research effort wed with fine writing . . . ultimately shaped by Smith’s beautiful narrative.” Smith’s poetry has been published in Poetry, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly; and several anthologies, including American Voices, The Spoken Word Revolution and Burn Rush the Page. Smith has also authored a children’s book, Janna and the Kings, and currently is working on Fixed on a Furious Star—a biography of Harriet Tubman. Smith has performed at several venues, including Carnegie Hall, in New York City; the Poets Stage, in Stockholm; and Rotterdam’s Poetry International Festival.

The Library’s Lamont Poetry Series is supported by the Lamont Fund, established in 1982 by Corliss Lamont ’20. Two poets are invited each year to read their poetry and attend English classes. Each visiting poet is photographed and asked to present the library with a manuscript poem, which is framed and hung on the fourth floor of the library. The collection of framed manuscript poems includes the works of such noted poets as Jorge Luis Borges, Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Joseph Brodsky and Allen Ginsberg. The series continues to bring remarkable poets to Exeter and remains a testimony to Mr. Lamont, who died in 1995.

For more information, please call Academy Librarian Jacquelyn H. Thomas at 603-777-3328 or visit the library’s events page. For directions to Phillips Exeter Academy, call 603-777-4330. A complete list of upcoming events is available on the Phillips Exeter Academy public events webpage, or at 603-777-4309.