Patricia Smith wins National Book Award for Poetry for ‘The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems’

Patricia Smith, a Princeton professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts, has received a National Book Award, the 2025 award for poetry, for “The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems.”

The prestigious awards from the National Book Foundation celebrate the best literature published in the United States, with one award each for fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature and young people’s literature. Two Princetonians were finalists for the 2025 nonfiction award: professor Yiyun Li, for her memoir “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” and Class of 2005 alumna Julia Ioffe, for “Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy.” 

Smith accepted the poetry award in front of a live audience at the 76th annual National Book Award ceremony, held Nov. 19 in New York City. In her speech, she thanked her family and then read a section from a piece about visiting her mother in her last days in a nursing home. 

Woven throughout the work — which takes the reader vividly into the room as Smith sits before her mother, who does not recognize her — is the insistent, joyful refrain “What does this have to do with poetry you ask? I’ll tell you.”

The final passage captures her mother’s last moments, and the invitation to look down and see her daughter in this moment, accepting this award:

My mother, Annie Pearl Smith of Aliceville, Alabama, died on March 15, 2024,
without saying another word beyond the two that she left me. But I can’t help but smile,
thinking of her there in the great unknowable with Gwen and Audre and Wanda and Toni and June looking down and nudging her over and over: “Annie Pearl, Annie Pearl, that’s your baby girl standing there in front of all them folks? Chile, look at where she is!”

“The Intentions of Thunder” includes poems from Smith’s nine collections, as well as new and previously uncollected poems that traverse every facet of life, comfortable and uncomfortable, violent and courageous, quiet and rapturous, encompassing history, current events and the possibilities of the future. In addition to receiving the National Book Award, it was recently named to Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2025: Poetry.

In 2023, Smith was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 2021, she received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, an award for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Foundation. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, among many other awards and prizes.

This fall, Smith is teaching poetry in the Program in Creative Writing.