Chicago-born Patti Smith is the winner of this year's Harold Washington Literary Award
Musician Patti Smith is no stranger to awards. Her long career has been peppered with them - honors such as a National Book Award for Nonfiction for "Just Kids" (2010), Grammy Hall of Fame for “Horses” (2021), Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (2007), and many others. She has even stood and sung on stage in Stockholm in 2016, accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature on behalf of her longtime pal, Bob Dylan.
The latest honor was announced Tuesday morning by the Near South Planning Board. On Sept. 10, Smith will be in Chicago to receive the Harold Washington Literary Award. It will be presented at a dinner at the Union League Club of Chicago, signaling the launch of the following weekend's 41st annual Printers Row Lit Fest.
This award is named for the city’s first African American mayor and has been presented since 1989, two years after Washington’s death in office. It is intended to recognize "diverse and stimulating authors who address issues of contemporary life and whose literary achievements include a significant body of work that has touched the public mind and imagination."
Anne Ream, co-chair of the HWLA selection committee, says, "Patti Smith is unparalleled in her ability to create deeply literary work across mediums. While her musical career is widely celebrated, her body of writing is equally profound - marked by moral clarity, artistic rigor, and deep empathy. She exemplifies the spirit of the Harold Washington Literary Award."
The list of previous recipients forms a star-studded group. It has included best-selling authors, poets, a few authors with tenuous ties to our city and others who have helped define our town, such as Studs Terkel, Stuart Dybek, Sara Paretsky, Alex Kotlowitz, Saul Bellow, Gwendolyn Brooks, Cyrus Colter and others.
Patricia Lee Smith was born here, in the Lincoln Park neighborhood at bygone Grant Hospital on the snow-swept night of Dec. 30, 1946. She was gone by the time she was four, but Chicago has been ever-present for her, in memories and in person.
She has said, "When I come to Chicago, I feel very excited, excited to be in the city. But I was born here. I had my first breath here and, you know, and my first thoughts here. " She has performed here dozens of times and at her "50th Anniversary Horses Tour" at the Chicago Theatre in late 2025, she called the city a “place that resists oppression.”
As she wrote about the city in her first book, her memoir "Just Kids," "By my father's account, I arrived a long skinny thing with bronchial pneumonia, and he kept me alive by holding me over a steaming washtub." And as she writes about the city in her latest book, 2025's "Bread of Angels: A Memoir," "I took my first steps in the kitchen in Chicago shortly before my first birthday."
It has been, now that she is striding toward her 80th birthday, quite a journey.
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This story was originally published May 12, 2026 at 5:17 AM.