Danez Smith

Danez Smith is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead, a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award which circles their Black, queer, and HIV positive status. At once haunted, sensual, explosive and intensely deliberate, this epic of intersectional identity is indispensable to contemporary poetry. The collection’s power is sourced both from the deep roots of American violence it traces and from Smith’s visionary, fantastical style: “I am best able to witness and transcribe the world if I’m allowed to see what could be, to peer over the surreal edge at another version of us,” they say in an interview with LitHub. “I don’t know exactly where that interest came from, but I trust imagination. I trust these queer and mythical lenses.” In this mode, Smith tangles with death even as they defy it—their subjects ranging from police shootings to gay dating culture to the disease that makes their own mortality so salient. “i’m not the kind of black man who dies on the news,” they write in a poem called “it won’t be a bullet,” “i’m the kind who grows thinner & thinner & thinner / until light outweighs us.”

Smith grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota and later attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a First Wave Urban Arts Scholar. They came to poetry through theater, their first poem written for an acting class in high school. Now their performance of this piece, “dear white america,” has been viewed by more than three hundred thousand people on YouTube. Refining their craft through performance, they have twice earned the title of Individual World Poetry Slam finalist and are the reigning two-time Rustbelt Individual Poetry Slam Champion. They have also served as festival director for the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam. Smith believes that “language lives and is performed by the body, transfixed just as much on the speaker as what’s being spoken,” and has said that “The deepest roots that led up to me being a poet are oral.”

Smith has published two chapbooks, hands on your knees and Black Movie, which lends Smith’s poetic eye to portrayals of Black Americans in film through poems like “Jim Crow, Rock Star,” “Sleeping Beauty in the Hood,” and “Notes for a Film on Black Joy.” Smith’s first full-length collection, [insert] boy, winner of both the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, explores and criticizes the erasure of of queer and Black identities, interrogating a society that views Black boys as “monster until proven ghost.” Smith files language to a point and drives it through each of their questions with a hot precision: “If race is over, did we lose?”

Danez Smith has been featured by The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, Buzzfeed, Best American Poetry, PBS NewsHour and the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. They were the inaugural winner of the Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America and have received fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem and the National Endowment for the Arts among others. Smith is also a founding member of the multigenre multicultural Dark Noise Collective, a movement who describes their unifying ethos as a “commitment to using art as a site for radical truth telling.” With fellow Dark Noise poet Franny Choi, they currently host the Poetry Foundation’s podcast VS.