BETHEL — Poet Patricia Smith will give a free public reading at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 26, in Bingham Auditorium at Gould Academy.

Her visit is part of the Richard Blanco Visiting Writers Program and Retreat.

She will also visit classrooms to speak to students and lead writing workshops.

Smith is a recipient of the Bobbit National Prize for Poetry and a National Book Award finalist for her poetry collection “Blood Dazzler.”

The program began in February 2014 as a collaboration between Blanco and Gould Academy. Writers are invited to stay at Blanco’s private cottage for two weeks to work on their craft and with students in writing workshops. Poet Spencer Reece was the first visiting writer in March 2014.

Smith has written six critically acclaimed volumes of poetry, including “Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah,” and was the winner of the 2013 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the editor of the crime fiction anthology “Staten Island Noir.”

She is a Cave Canem faculty member, a professor of English at the City University of New York College of Staten Island, and a faculty member of the Sierra Nevada Master of Fine Arts program.

For more information, visit www.gouldacademy.org.