“I grew up learning how to protect men who hate me.”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button Playlist, featuring the hottest recent videos on the Button YouTube channel. Updated every week! Today’s additions: Crystal Valentine, Aaliyah Jihad, and Ellyn Touchette. Congratulations poets!
Danez Smith’s new chapbook, Black Movie, is now available for order! Check it out in the Button store. Get it by midnight CST tonight for a signed copy!
“I used to be something. Someone wrapped in entirety. I used to be answers, semesters of filled-in bubble sheets.”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the hottest recent videos on the channel. Updated every week! Today’s additions: Shavontae Patrick and Zev Verdoner. Congratulations poets!
Danez Smith is the winner of a 2014 Ruth Lilly/Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. They are the author of Homie (Graywolf), Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf), “[insert] boy” (YesYes Books, 2014), one of the Boston Globe’s Best Poetry Books of 2014, & two chapbooks– “black movie” (Button Poetry, 2015), winner of the 2014 Button Poetry Prize, & “hands on ya knees” (Penmanship Books, 2013).
Smith is a Cave Canem, VONA, and McKnight Foundation Fellow. Their writing has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, Narrative & elsewhere. They were featured in The Academy of American Poets’ Emerging Poets Series by Patricia Smith. They are a founding member of the multi-genre, multicultural collective Dark Noise. Danez placed second at the 2014 Individual World Poetry Slam and is the two-time Rustbelt Regional Champion. In 2014, they were the Festival Director for the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam. Danez holds a BA from UW-Madison where they were a First Wave Urban Arts Scholar. They live in Minneapolis, MN.