Don't Call Us Dead by Danez Smith

Don't Call Us Dead by Danez Smith

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection

Smith's] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy.--The New Yorker

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality--the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood--and a diagnosis of HIV positive. Some of us are killed / in pieces, Smith writes, some of us all at once. Don't Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America--Dear White America--where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.

Danez Smith is the author of [INSERT] BOY (YesYes Books, 2014), which won the Lambda Literary Prize for LGBT Poetry and was a finalist for the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. Graywolf Publications will publish his second collection, Don't Call Us Dead, in 2017. He's also the author of the Button Poetry Prize-winning chapbooks hands on yo knees and black movie. Poetry Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, Buzzfeed, Blavity, and Ploughshares have all published and highlighted his poetry. He is a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow from 2014, as well as a Cave Canem and VONA alumnus and a McKnight Foundation Fellow.

He has competed in the Individual World Poetry Slam twice, finishing second in 2014. He is a founder member of two collectives, Dark Noise and Sad Boy Supper Club, and edits for The Offing. He spends the majority of his time in the Midwest.