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The 2026 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Poetry

Finalist: The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems, by Patricia Smith (Scribner)

A bold re-imagining of the “new and selected” form where the poet enters into dialogue with her earlier poems, transforming a career retrospective into an engagement with earlier selves.

Nominated Work

The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems

By

Patricia Smith

 

WINNER OF THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING POETRY

“Patricia Smith is the greatest living poet. Every book is better than the last.” —The Guardian

“In The Intentions of Thunder, language itself becomes weather—charged, clarifying, and resounding, a form of resurrection and survival.” —National Book Award Judges' Citation

A collection of the finest new and selected poems from one of the most groundbreaking voices in contemporary poetry, a “masterful performer and poet of voices too little heard” (Poetry Foundation).

The Intentions of Thunder gathers, for the first time, the essential work from across Patricia Smith’s decorated career. Here, Smith’s poems, affixed with her remarkable gift of insight, present a rapturous ode to life. With careful yet vaulting movement, these poems traverse the redeeming landscape of pain, confront the frightening revelations of history, and disclose the joyous possibilities of the future. The result is a profound testament to the necessity of poetry—all the careful witness, embodied experience, and bristling pleasure that it bestows.

Lyrical and sly, meditative and volcanic, The Intentions of Thunder is “an unforgettable offering from one of the most important voices in poetry” (Publishers Weekly) and a stunning exploration of the fullness of living. The inimitable poetry of Patricia Smith radiates in The Intentions of Thunder—reaffirming Smith’s place as one of the indispensable poets of our time.

Biography

Patricia Smith is an inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement. She is the author of nine acclaimed books of poetry, including Unshuttered; Incendiary Art, finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the 2018 NAACP Image Award; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist. A Guggenheim Fellow, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, Smith is a creative writing professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and a former distinguished professor at the City University of New York. She lives in New Jersey with her husband.
 

Winners

Prize Winner in Poetry in 2026:

Juliana Spahr

A collection in which the poet takes stock of her personal disillusionment, which she uses to interrogate her relationship to her art form, community and politics. Poetry

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Poetry in 2026:

Douglas Kearney

A multiverse of poems that burst off the page in vivid innovative structures, deploying collage, comix, music, typography, wordplay and fiction to push literary boundaries.

The Jury

Tracy K. Smith(Chair)*

Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory; Professor of African and African American Studies; and Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University

Camille Dungy

University Distinguished Professor and Director, Creative Writing Program, Colorado State University

J. Michael Martinez

Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing and Director, Center for Literary Arts, San Jose State University

D.A. Powell

Professor, Program in Writing, University of San Francisco

Elizabeth Willis

Professor of Poetry, Iowa Writers' Workshop

Winners in Poetry

2025

Marie Howe

A collection drawn from decades of work that mines the day-to-day modern experience for evidence of our shared loneliness, mortality and holiness.
2024

Brandon Som

A collection that deeply engages with the complexities of the poet’s dual Mexican and Chinese heritage, highlighting the dignity of his family’s working lives, creating community rather than conflict.
2023

Carl Phillips

A masterful collection that chronicles American culture as the country struggles to make sense of its politics, of life in the wake of a pandemic, and of our place in a changing global community.  
2022

Diane Seuss

A virtuosic collection that inventively expands the sonnet form to confront the messy contradictions of contemporary America, including the beauty and the difficulty of working-class life in the Rust Belt.
See All Poetry

2026 Prize Winners

Opinion Writing

M. Gessen of The New York Times

For an illuminating collection of reported essays on rising authoritarian regimes that draw on history and personal experience to probe timely themes of oppression, belonging and exile.
See All 2026 Winners