An Evening with Patti Smith

This Women's History Month, join the legendary Patti Smith for a special event as part of The Cooper Union’s Gardiner Foundation Great Hall Forum series. Named one of TIME’s 100 most influential people in the world, Smith is a pioneering American artist and Rock n Roll Hall of Famer. As a poet, singer, songwriter, fine artist, and New York Times bestselling author, Smith has produced a body of work with the kind of influence that reaches through generations, across disciplines, and around the world. Kit Nicholls, director of The Cooper Union Center for Writing and Learning, will be in conversation with Smith about her groundbreaking career.

Born in Chicago, raised in South Jersey, and emerging in the nascent cultural hotbed of mid-70s New York City, Patti Smith forged a reputation as one of the decade’s first visionary artists—merging poetry and rock in vital new ways. Her 1975 debut album, Horses, which celebrates 50 years this fall, is routinely ranked as one of the greatest albums of all time and has been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress. In 2007, she was inducted into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame. She is a four-time Grammy nominee and a Golden Globe nominee for the song “Mercy Is,” cowritten with Lenny Kaye for the film Noah. In 2010, she won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction for Just Kids, a bestselling memoir about her early days in New York and her deep friendship and collaboration with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Just Kids is currently being developed into a TV series for Showtime, with Smith co-writing and producing the show. More recently, Smith published Year of the Monkey, a profound, beautifully realized memoir in which dreams and reality are vividly woven into a tapestry of one transformative year in her life. As a fine artist, Smith, who is represented by the Robert Miller Gallery, has exhibited at galleries and museums worldwide. Smith is the recipient of the 2020 PEN America Literary Service Award, honoring her prolific career and unflinching determination to speak truth and protest injustice. She has also been distinguished as a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture and is the recipient of the Founders Award by ASCAP and Sweden’s Polar Award, an international acknowledgement for significant achievements in music, among other honors. At present Smith writes and performs, lending support for human-rights issues and environmental groups, primarily Pathway to Paris, a nonprofit organization co-founded by her daughter Jesse Paris Smith which offers tangible solutions for combatting global climate crises.

Kit Nicholls directs The Cooper Union Center for Writing and Learning, supporting a mission to improve student learning across the curriculum and to support faculty in the teaching of reading and writing. Nicholls is co-author, with William Germano, of Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything (Princeton University Press, 2020), and his essays have appeared in venues such as European Romantic Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Psyche. He is the producer and host of "Seed Catalog: A Podcast About Teaching, Learning, and Hope," available wherever you get your podcasts. He received a Ph.D. in English at New York University and a B.A. in creative writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.