Danez Smith


Danez Smith is a black, queer, non-binary, HIV-positive writer and performer from St. Paul, MN. They are the author of the poetry collection Boy and Don't Call Us Dead: Poems, both of which have received multiple awards.

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 uses they/them pronouns.

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 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 three books. 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, was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for poetry. Smith is also the author of two chapbooks, hands on your knees and black movie, 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. Smith serves on the board of directors for the D.C.-based poetry non-profit Split This Rock.

Works

Poems

Ricegate

At 9:00 AM on November 19, 2019, Twitter user Jon Becker tweeted the words "Please quote tweet this with your most controversial food opinion, I love controversial food opinions." While seemingly harmless, this tweet would soon go on to be the basis of a fiery Twitter controversy. Five days later, at 10:03 AM on the morning of November 24, 2019, Smith quoted Becker in a response, saying: "No rice has ever been good. Not jollof, not fried, not white, brown, wild, yellow, red, not with a little saffron or with a lil garlic. Rice is just there cause the meat and veggies won't stretch. Rice is just here to fix wet phones." Smith faced backlash from the horrified general public, including several fellow poets. Poet Franny Choi, with whom Smith co-hosts poetry podcast VS, replied with a tweet featuring a screenshot reporting the tweet for being abusive or harmful.
Three days later, on November 27, 2019, Smith tweeted: "Please add #ricegate to the controversy section of my Wikipedia page."

Awards