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Patti Smith

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Punk's poet laureate — 'Horses' remains a sacrament, and every performance still reads as testimony, rock's great living poet at work.

Patti Smith was born in Chicago in 1946, the daughter of a jazz singer turned waitress and a machinist. Her family moved between Philadelphia, Pitman, New Jersey and finally Deptford Township, where she graduated high school in 1964, then worked in a factory and briefly attended Glassboro State College before leaving for Paris with her sister in 1969.

In Paris she busked and did performance art; back in New York she lived at the Hotel Chelsea with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and frequented Max's Kansas City. She appeared in downtown theatre, including plays by Jackie Curtis and Anthony Ingrassia, and spent the early 1970s writing and performing with the Poetry Project crowd, moving toward music when guitarist Lenny Kaye began accompanying her readings; their first show together, in February 1971, opened for poet Gerard Malanga.

Working as a poet and writer, she formed a band with Kaye, and her debut album Horses, released in 1975 and produced by John Cale, fused spoken-word poetry with garage rock. It is widely treated as a founding document of New York punk, and the record earned her the nicknames Queen of Punk and Godmother of Punk.

Her later work includes "Because the Night," co-written with Bruce Springsteen, which reached the top twenty of the Billboard Hot 100 and the top five of the UK Singles Chart in 1978. She released albums both before and after a long period away from performing in the 1980s and early 1990s.

She is also an author; her memoir Just Kids, about her friendship with Mapplethorpe, won the National Book Award in 2010. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007 and awarded the Polar Music Prize in 2011. Her performances continue to combine music with reading and improvised speech.

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