Homie by Danez Smith

Homie by Danez Smith

FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY
FINALIST FOR THE 2021 NAACP IMAGE AWARD FOR POETRY

Danez Smith is our president

Homie is Danez Smith's magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith's close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family--blood and chosen--arrives with just the right food and some redemption. Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danez's friends and for you and for yours.

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.