“It’s difficult to describe how I felt about the pictures I collected, how I continued to forge a link with them that I didn’t particularly understand.” Patricia Smith speaks about the photographs she collected over the course of twenty years that inspired her latest collection, Unshuttered (Northwestern University Press, 2023), for this recording of the Academy of American Poets’ 2023 Blaney Lecture. For more on Smith, read her conversation with Tyehimba Jess in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.