Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press) is a book of poetry by Patricia Smith, and the winner of both the 2013 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and Wheatley Book Award in Poetry, as well as a finalist for the 2013 William Carlos Williams Award. In it she describes the second wave of the Great Migration, and coming up as an “up North” child on Chicago’s West Side, listening to her parents listening to Motown.

The book incorporates old school forms along with free verse and spoken word, and some pieces resulted from prompts Smith originally gave to her students in New York, then did herself too. She held a Chicago book release party at Louder Than a Bomb, under the Zodiac Tiffany dome at the Chicago Cultural Center.