Danez Smith

Danez Smith is an American poet. They are the author of the poetry collection [insert] Boy, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and Don't Call Us Dead: Poems, a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for poetry.

Personal life
Smith was born in St. Paul, Minnesota and attended Central High School. Their family is from Mississippi and Georgia. Smith was a First Wave Urban Arts Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, graduating with a BA in 2012. Smith is genderqueer and goes by the pronoun they.

Career
Smith is a founding member of Dark Noise Collective with Fatimah Asghar, Franny Choi, Nate Marshall, Aaron Samuels, and Jamila Woods.

With Jamila Woods, Smith joined Macklemore for a performance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in February, 2016. Their writing has been published in Poetry (magazine) and Ploughshares. On March 30, 2017, Smith was the inaugural guest of the Alexander Lawrence Posey Speaker Series at the University of Central Oklahoma.

Smith is the author of two books. [insert] Boy won the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, with jurist Chase Twitchell describing Smith's poetry as "remarkable for its nervy, surprising, morally urgent poems." Smith's second book, Don't Call Us Dead: Poems, is a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for poetry. Smith is also the author of two chapbooks, hands on your knees (2013, Penmanship Books) and black movie (2015, Button Poetry), winner of the Button Poetry Prize.

Smith has twice been a finalist in Individual World Poetry Slam, placing second in 2014.

With Franny Choi, Smith is co-host of the poetry podcast VS from the Poetry Foundation.

Smith won a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts grant.

In 2018, Smith's sonnet sequence "summer, somewhere" received the inaugural Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America. At age 29, Smith also became the youngest recipient of the £10,000 Forward Prize for best poetry collection, as Don't Call Us Dead beat out works by U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith and former Forward winner Vahni Capildeo.

Poems

 * "poem where I be & you just might" (Poetry Society of America)
 * "Dinosaurs in the Hood" (Poetry, December 2014)
 * "the bullet was a girl" (Poem-a-Day by the Academy of American Poets, September 3, 2015)
 * "Principles" (video from Brave New Voices Festival, July 2016)
 * "You're Dead, America" (Buzzfeed, November 9, 2016)
 * "C.R.E.A.M." (Poem-a-Day by the Academy of American Poets, February 1, 2017)
 * "Don't Try Us" (Fader, May 1, 2017)
 * Selection from "summer, somewhere" (New York Times, June 9, 2017)

Chapbooks

 * hands on your knees (2013, Penmanship Books)
 * black movie (2015, Button Poetry)

Books

 * [insert] Boy (2014) ISBN 978-1936919284
 * Don't Call Us Dead (2017) ISBN 978-1555977856

In Anthology

 * Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology (University of Georgia Press, 2018) ISBN 978-0820353159

Awards

 * 2018 – Forward Prize for best poetry collection
 * 2018 – Four Quartets Prize
 * 2017 – NEA fellowship for creative writing
 * 2016 – Kate Tufts Discovery Award
 * 2015 – Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry