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.

Patricia Smith

She’s an associate professor in the English department at the College of Staten Island, part of the City University of New York.

“It’s been 16 years, you know,” said Ms. Smith, 59. “People have to give you a chance to be who you are now."

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.

In 2006, Ms. Smith published “Teahouse of the Almighty,” a National Poetry Series selection that explores sex and sexuality and African-American art. Then came “Blood Dazzler” in 2008, about Hurricane Katrina, a finalist for the National Book Award.

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