Patricia Smith, 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 (Lewis Center for the Arts) 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.”
