The poet, singer, songwriter, and visual artist Patti Smith, a singular figure in New York counterculture that continues to create and inspire well into her eighth decade of life. Her 1975 debut album Horses is widely considered one of the greatest albums of all time, and her memoirs serve as a time capsule for a downtown arts scene and some of its most fascinating personalities. She won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2010 for Just Kids, her book about her earliest days in New York making art with Robert Mapplethorpe, and in 2015 published M Train, about her life with and after her husband, the musician Fred (Sonic) Smith, who died in 1994. Her latest book Devotion explores the nature of creative invention. For her performance of Words and Music, Smith is backed by her son Jackson, her daughter Jesse Paris Smith, and her frequent bandmate Tony Shanahan, sharing original spoken-word stories from her life interspersed with songs and taking questions from the audience.
