Background
Danez Smith was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States.
2015
Danez Smith at GREY GOOSE Vodka Hosts The Inaugural Mic50 Awards at Marquee on June 18, 2015, in New York City. Photo by Neilson Barnard.
2016
929 S Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90015, United States
Danez Smith at Literary Death Match 10 Year Anniversary at The Theatre at Ace Hotel on April 1, 2016. Photo by Justin Baker.
2017
55 Wall St a, New York, NY 10005, United States
Danez Smith at the 68th National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner at Cipriani Wall Street on November 15, 2017. Photo by Evan Agostini.
Danez Smith
Danez Smith
Danez Smith. Photo by Kristin Adair.
Danez Smith
Danez Smith
Danez Smith
Danez Smith
Danez Smith
Danez Smith
Danez Smith
Danez Smith
Danez Smith
Danez Smith
Danez Smith. Photo by Hieu Minh Nguyen.
Danez Smith. Photo by Uche Iroegbu.
Danez Smith with Rachel Zucker.
Danez Smith
Danez Smith with Franny Choi.
Lambda Literary Award which Danez Smith received in 2015.
275 Lexington Pkwy N, St Paul, MN 55104, United States
Saint Paul Central High School where Danez Smith studied.
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, United States
The University of Wisconsin-Madison where Danez Smith received a Bachelor of Arts degree.
(In the poems in [insert] boy, Smith opens the reader to a...)
In the poems in [insert] boy, Smith opens the reader to a world of desire, longing, and deep mourning that picks up where his brothers Hopkins and Whitman left off. Startling in their formal range and virtuosity, these poems interrogate the ways the body not only inhabits but actually becomes public and private space. Danez Smith lays down the gauntlet for all of us to speak our deepest truths with more elegance, more ferocity, and almost more beauty than a reader can bear.
https://www.amazon.com/insert-Kate-Tufts-Discovery-Award/dp/1936919281/ref=sr_1_4?crid=20HA8FNZJBLVL&keywords=danez+smith&qid=1579687290&sprefix=danez+%2Caps%2C302&sr=8-4
2014
(Danez Smith’s Black Movie is a cinematic tour-de-force th...)
Danez Smith’s Black Movie is a cinematic tour-de-force that lets poetry vie with film for the honor of which medium can most effectively articulate the experience of Black America. The book takes an unflinching look at how Black Americans have been portrayed in the film, and in doing so posits, initially, film as the ultimate myth-making tool of our era. Using this as its jumping-off point, Smith catalogs, in lyric poems that range from the fragment to the prose poem, how filmic myths exist in tension with the real life of Black Americans.
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Movie-Danez-Smith/dp/194373500X/ref=sr_1_3?crid=20HA8FNZJBLVL&keywords=danez+smith&qid=1579687290&sprefix=danez+%2Caps%2C302&sr=8-3
2015
(Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence tha...)
Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality - the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood - and a diagnosis of HIV positive. "Some of us are killed / in pieces," Smith writes, "some of us all at once." Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America - "Dear White America" - where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.
https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Call-Us-Dead-Poems/dp/1555977855/ref=sr_1_2?crid=20HA8FNZJBLVL&keywords=danez+smith&qid=1579687290&sprefix=danez+%2Caps%2C302&sr=8-2
2017
(Homie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the savin...)
Homie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family - blood and chosen - arrives with just the right food and some redemption.
https://www.amazon.com/Homie-Poems-Danez-Smith/dp/1644450100/ref=sr_1_1?crid=20HA8FNZJBLVL&keywords=danez+smith&qid=1579687176&sprefix=danez+%2Caps%2C302&sr=8-1
2020
Danez Smith was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States.
Danez Smith attended Saint Paul Central High School. Then they studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 2012 where they were a First Wave Urban Arts Scholar.
Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. A poet, performer, and multidisciplinary artist, Smith has galvanized diverse communities nationwide with their profound contemplations on race and gender, desire and mortality. They are a poet whose writings appeared in many magazines and journals, such as Poetry, Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Kinfolks. They were featured by The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, Buzzfeed, Best American Poetry, PBS NewsHour, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Smith’s first full-length collection, [insert] Boy (2014), explores and criticizes the erasure 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?" Their second book, Don't Call Us Dead: Poems, was published in 2017. They are also the author of two chapbooks, hands on your knees (2013) and black movie (2015). His recent book Homie (2020) is a magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship at a time when the United States is overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, speaking from within a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis. Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book.
In 2014 they were the festival director for the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam. Smith is also a founding member of the multigenre multicultural Dark Noise Collective, a movement that 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.
(Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence tha...)
2017(Danez Smith’s Black Movie is a cinematic tour-de-force th...)
2015(In the poems in [insert] boy, Smith opens the reader to a...)
2014(Homie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the savin...)
2020Smith believes that "language lives and is performed by the body, transfixed just as much on the speaker as what’s being spoken."
Quotations:
"Poetry is kind of moving away from that apolitical, anti-emotional, anti-sense-making thing that popped up in the 90s. Academia took a grip hold on poetry, and I’m very much anti that. I want to push away from poetry devoid of the "I" or feeling or a politicalness or a meaning."
"I'm most excited by poems that make me not only giddy about language and all that but poems that, through language, better equip me to re-enter the world and proceed vigorously."
"Read more than you write, write even when it's bad, and when it’s bad it probably means you should read more."
"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."
"The deepest roots that led up to me being a poet are oral."
Danez Smith is queer and gender-neutral. Smith has chosen the pronoun 'they' to speak about the personality.
Physical Characteristics: Danez Smith is HIV positive.