A literary phoenix
Patricia Smith, who resigned in disgrace in 1998 after she made up characters and quotes in her Boston Globe stories that made her a Pulitzer finalist, in December won the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Library of Congress, and in April she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry.
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| Patricia Smith |
She does not talk about how her journalism career imploded, how her
marriage fell apart afterward or how she sank into depression over her
self-inflicted wounds.
She moved from Boston to New Jersey, with
stops in between; found work, for a time, as a columnist at Ms. Magazine;
remarried; raised a granddaughter; earned a Master of Fine Arts degree; and
soared to a level of literary success that has eluded many writers.
By the time she resigned from the Boston
Globe, Ms. Smith had published three books and won four National Poetry Slams.
Her latest book, published in 2012, is “Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah,” a memoir
in verse that won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of
American Poets in 2013 and, last month, the Bobbitt prize.
Walter V. Robinson, who discovered Ms. Smith’s fabrications in the 1990s
and is currently The Globe’s editor at large, said that he marvels at her
transformation.
“The fact of the matter is that in life, for all of us, we are judged very
much by how we bounce back from adversity,” Mr. Robinson said. “In that sense,
I’m really heartened by what’s happened in her life.”.
In February, Ms. Smith will read from “Jimi Savannah” at the Library of
Congress.
To read Rachel Swarns’ entire artice in the
New York Times, click on http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/26/nyregion/patricia-smith-finds-solace-and-success-in-poetry.html?emc=eta1&_r=0
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