Patricia Smith is very good at performance poetry, like freestyle rap battles without a beat, but as a journalist she could never quite grasp that poetry was fiction and journalism wasn’t. She could write, she was good with words and phrases, talents that journalism seeks out and rewards, but she would rather write a good story, usually fiction, than hit the pavement to flesh out the truth.

Patricia Smith began her career in journalism in the late 1970s as an entry level clerk at the Chicago Daily News, first as a typist and later as a music and entertainment reviewer. When the Daily News folded in 1978, she then worked as an entertainment writer for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1978 to 1990. She left the Sun-Times after it was discovered that she had written a review of a concert that she did not attend. In 1990 she moved to the Boston Globe, beginning as an entertainment critic, and eventually was made a reporter and the paper’s metro columnist. She was fired from the Globe in 1998 for fabricating characters and events in one of her metro columns. The Globe editors, after further investigation, believed that an additional 52 columns or hers contained fictional elements.

Source: New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Media Nation. Graphic: Patricia Smith