Danez Smith
Quick answer: A craft guide to Danez Smith: performance energy on the page, litany and direct address, register-switching, and where to begin with their books.
Few poets move between stage and page as convincingly as Danez Smith. Born in 1989 and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, Smith came up through the slam world before publishing collections that gathered major literary honours, including the Forward Prize for Best Collection for Don't Call Us Dead. Smith is Black, queer and nonbinary, and their poems treat those identities as sites of imagination as much as subjects of testimony.
For a writer, Smith is a masterclass in energy management: how to get the propulsion of live performance into printed lines without losing precision. If your poems read politely and you want them to read urgently, this is a poet to study closely.
From slam stage to prize lists
Smith's background in competitive performance poetry shows in everything they publish: the poems assume a listening audience, build in waves, and know exactly when to turn. But the books are not transcripts of performances. [insert] boy, Don't Call Us Dead and Homie are carefully engineered page objects, full of visual arrangement, sequencing and typographic choices that only work in print.
Don't Call Us Dead (2017) was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Forward Prize, a rare transatlantic endorsement for a poet still in their twenties. The work matters because it proves the supposed wall between spoken word and literary poetry is a fiction; craft travels in both directions.
The signature moves
Read any Smith poem twice and you will likely find these devices doing the heavy lifting.
What you can learn
Practise litany with a rule: repeat an opener at least six times, but make each repetition escalate or swerve. The repetition is scaffolding; the variation is the poem. Then audit your diction range. If every word in your draft comes from the same register, introduce one calculated collision, a liturgical word inside casual speech or the reverse, and listen to the spark.
The deepest lesson is the counter-world. When a subject is painful, the documentary impulse can flatten a poem into report. Try building the alternative instead: the world where the loss did not happen, or where the lost are gathered somewhere specific. Imagination becomes the vehicle of grief rather than its evasion.
Where to start reading
Begin with Don't Call Us Dead, the central book. Homie (2020) shows the friendship poems and the warmest register; [insert] boy (2014) is the rawer early work; Bluff (2024) extends the political self-questioning. Recordings of Smith performing are widely available and worth watching alongside the books, since comparing a performed poem with its printed version is itself a free craft lesson.
What poets can take from this
- Use anaphora as scaffolding, but let each repetition escalate or swerve.
- Choose the 'you' of a poem deliberately; the addressee sets the stakes.
- Mix registers on purpose: one collision per stanza beats uniform politeness.
- When grief flattens a draft into report, build a counter-world instead.
- Test poems aloud; if a line dies in the mouth, it will limp on the page.
- Study performance videos against printed versions of the same poem.
Try it yourself
Write a litany that begins every sentence with the same two words, addressed to a group of people you love. Let the repetitions grow from ordinary detail to impossible wish.
Questions
What is Danez Smith famous for?
Smith is known for bridging slam performance and literary poetry. Their collection Don't Call Us Dead won the Forward Prize for Best Collection and was a National Book Award finalist.
What pronouns does Danez Smith use?
Danez Smith is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns. Their work often explores Black, queer and nonbinary experience alongside friendship, illness and American politics.
Which Danez Smith book should I read first?
Start with Don't Call Us Dead (2017), widely considered the essential book. Follow it with Homie (2020) for a warmer, friendship-centred register.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.