Poetry by the Sea is thrilled to welcome Patricia Smith as the Keynote speaker for our 2027 Conference. The conference will run from Tuesday May 25 to Friday May 28, 2027, and the Keynote reading will take place on Wednesday, May 26 following the banquet. Books will be available for sale before and after the Keynote, and you are also welcome to bring books you already own for a brief signing after the event.
check back in january 2027 for conference registration information
or for how TO Register for Keynote ONLY
Time: 8:15-10:00 p.m.
Venue: Dempsey Hall, Mercy Center, 167 Neck Rd., Madison, CT 06443
Tickets: $15 for non-conference attendees (Pay in advance or at door)
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 (2023); 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, and an inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She serves as an Academy of American Poets Chancellor and is 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.