Patricia Smith starts her most recent collection, "Teahouse of the Almighty" (Coffee House, 2006), with a poem for sixth-graders at Lillie C. Evans School in Miami, where Smith taught in residencies in 1997-99 and 2006. In the poem, she asks a class "the death question," and "forty fists punch the air," the kids "shouting me, me,/ Miss Smith, I know somebody dead!"

The poem, "Building Nicole's Mama," is named for a girl whose mother died of AIDS and who seeks Smith's help in memorializing her. Smith writes of the children's numb familiarity with the reaper, "grim in his heavy robe,/ pushing the button for the dead project elevator,/ begging for a break at the corner pawn shop,/ cackling wildly in the back pew of the Baptist church."

Poetry, she writes, became Nicole's "scream," a way to "build her mother again" with words. She challenges all poets, all people, to remember the Nicoles of this world, to remember that they are empty vessels "waiting to be filled."

With that challenge, and with her own verbal fists raised, she writes -- of a woman who loses both her father and husband in Iraq; of unthinkable crimes; of the ragged end to a marriage; of a California teenager who dies, leaving his donor heart for a girlfriend whose body rejects it anyway; of being a typical "single, black" woman "with an 18-to-30-year-old male child behind bars," of men who love and leave and lie.

The poems are sexy, angry, scary and sometimes funny. In a review of "Teahouse of the Almighty," a National Poetry Series winner, Publisher's Weekly called Smith the "rarest of creatures, a charismatic slam and performance poet whose artistry truly survives on the printed page."

There is a stain on this powerful word-woman's record: She resigned as a columnist for the Boston Globe in 1998 after editors discovered that she had fabricated people and quotations in several of her columns. "I could give them names, even occupations, but I couldn't give them what they needed most -- a heartbeat," she wrote in her final column. "As anyone who's ever touched a newspaper knows, that's one of the cardinal sins of journalism: Thou shall not fabricate. No exceptions. No excuses."

Indeed, there was no excuse for what she did as a journalist. As a poet, she gives her subjects that elusive heartbeat.

Kay Sexton winner Don Leeper, founder and president of BookMobile, a print-on-demand business based in Minneapolis, has been named the 2008 winner of the Kay Sexton Award, given each year for outstanding contributions to Minnesota literature and letters. "The combination of [Leeper's] manufacturing and technical skills, entrepreneurial spirit, love of literature, and his wide-ranging and inquisitive intelligence have helped the Minnesota book community to be recognized as one of the leading publishing centers in the United States," judges said this week in a statement issued by the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library. The award will be presented April 12 at the annual Minnesota Book Awards ceremonies. For more information, go to www.thefriends.org.

Sarah T. Williams is the Star Tribune Books editor.