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Jasmine Elizabeth Smith
she/her
Poet, Educator
Jasmine Elizabeth Smith (she/her) is a Black poet and educator from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She received her MFA in Poetry from the University of California in Riverside. She is a Cave Canem, Black Arts Institute, Glucks Art Fellow, and a recipient of the 2025 National Endowment of Arts in Poetry.
Jasmine Elizabeth’s poetic work is invested in the Diaspora of Black Americans in various historical contexts and eras. Her work has been featured in World Literature Today, POETRY, LA Review of Book, and This is the Honey: Contemporary Anthology of African American Poetry, among others. Her debut collection, South Flight, won the 2020 Georgia Poetry Prize.
Smith lives and teaches in Seattle, Washington.
About Their Work:
A quick scan of Jasmine's poetry in South Flight and elsewhere turns up a rich tapestry of historical events -- from the Tulsa massacres, to Jonestown, to the floodings of New Orleans -- but these poems do more than evoke historical data and contexts. They are not just period-piece narratives about the atrocities that litter the histories of the Diaspora of Black Americans. Her soliloquies, lyrics, and epistles investigate the abyss of the forgotten, ignored, and outright erased, conjuring up through their rhythmic data, voices of the repressed wrestling all sorts of devils and devilments in those flattened notes and percussive lines that propel feelings of loss and pain and disappointment in only the way a blues can, as a prophetic howl that cuts through violence of the white imagination with teeth grown "longer, sharper with expression." Part eulogy, part love letter to Black communities and forms of resistance, these poems bring us again and again to the crossroad, to the liminal space where you encounter the "beautiful & blood-close/& the powder keg you believed you narrowly escaped."
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Website(s):
Books (for purchase):
South Flight (University of Georgia Press, 2022)
Online Work:
Check out her work on her linktree and her website.
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