[3] In November 2010, Smith won the National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids,[4] written to fulfill a promise she made to Robert Mapplethorpe, her longtime partner and friend.

They frequented Max's Kansas City on Park Avenue, and Smith provided the spoken word soundtrack for Sandy Daley's art film Robert Having His Nipple Pierced, starring Mapplethorpe.

The B-side describes the helpless alienation Smith felt while working on a factory assembly line and the salvation she dreams of achieving by escaping to New York City.

[21] On January 23, 1977, while touring in support of Radio Ethiopia, Smith accidentally danced off a high stage in Tampa, Florida, and fell 15-feet onto a concrete orchestra pit, breaking several cervical vertebrae.

[16] In 1996, Smith worked with her long-time colleagues to record Gone Again, featuring "About a Boy", a tribute to Kurt Cobain, the former lead singer of Nirvana who died by suicide in 1994.

On October 15, 2006, Smith performed a 3½-hour tour de force show to close out at CBGB, which was an immensely influential New York City live music venue for much of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

On September 10, 2009, after a week of smaller events and exhibitions in Florence, Smith played an open-air concert at Piazza Santa Croce, commemorating her performance in the same city 30 years earlier.

American Songwriter wrote that, "These songs aren't as loud or frantic as those of her late 70s heyday, but they resonate just as boldly as she moans, chants, speaks and spits out lyrics with the grace and determination of Mohammad Ali in his prime.

After the official presentation speech for the literary prize by Horace Engdahl, the perpetual secretary of the Swedish Academy, Smith sang the Dylan song "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall".

From March 28 to June 22, 2008, the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris hosted a major exhibition of the visual artwork of Land 250, drawn from pieces created by Smith between 1967 and 2007.

She named the project after a sign she saw in the abode of Pope Celestine V, which translates as "a room of one's own", and which Smith felt best described her solitary method of photography.

[45] The exhibition featured artifacts that were everyday items or places of significance to artists Smith admires, including Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, John Keats, and William Blake.

[58] In addition, Smith narrated Darren Aronofsky's VR experience Spheres: Songs of Spacetime along with Millie Bobby Brown and Jessica Chastain.

[62] In 2024, Smith appeared as herself in Turn in the Wound, a documentary by Abel Ferrara about performance, poetry, music and the experience of people at war, focusing on life in Kyiv since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In the liner notes of his 1972 album Something/Anything?, Rundgren wrote that "Song of the Viking" was "written in the feverish grip of the dreaded 'd'oyle carte,' a chronic disease dating back to my youth.

Love received Smith's album Horses in juvenile hall as a teenager, and "realized that you could do something that was completely subversive that didn't involve violence [or] felonies.

[72] In 2000, the Australian alternative rock band The Go-Betweens dedicated the song "When She Sang About Angels" on their album The Friends of Rachel Worth to Smith.

[95] She led the crowd singing "Over the Rainbow" and "People Have the Power" at the campaign's rallies, and also performed at several of Nader's subsequent "Democracy Rising" events.

[96] Smith was a speaker and singer at the first protests against the Iraq War as U.S. President George W. Bush spoke to the United Nations General Assembly.

"Without Chains"[99] is about Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen who was born and raised in Germany, held at Guantanamo Bay detainment camp for four years.

It's a human rights violation.In a 2009 interview, Smith stated that Kurnaz's family had contacted her and that she wrote a short preface for the book that he was writing,[100] which was released in March 2008.

[103] In 2015, Smith appeared with Nader, spoke and performed the songs "Wing" and "People Have the Power" during the American Museum of Tort Law convocation ceremony in Winsted, Connecticut.

[112] In May 2021, more than 600 musicians, including Patti Smith, added their signature to an open letter calling for a boycott of performances in Israel until the occupation of the Palestinian territories comes to an end.

[113] On February 24, 2022, Smith performed at The Capitol Theatre (Port Chester, New York) for the first time,[114] saying, "I would be lying if I said I wasn't affected by what is happening in the world" referencing the Russian invasion of Ukraine earlier that day.

[117] She has described having an avid interest in Tibetan Buddhism around the age of 11 or 12, saying "I fell in love with Tibet because their essential mission was to keep a continual stream of prayer," but that as an adult she sees clear parallels between different forms of religion and has concluded that religious dogmas are "…man-made laws that you can either decide to abide by or not.

[120] According to biographer Nick Johnstone, Smith has often been "revered" as a "feminist icon",[121] including by The Guardian journalist Simon Hattenstone in a 2013 profile on the musician.

As the closing number of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, Smith's "People Have the Power" was used for the big celebrity jam that traditionally ends the program.

[127] She made her television acting debut at age 64 on the TV series Law & Order: Criminal Intent, appearing in an episode titled "Icarus".

[128] In 2024, Smith, along with Yoko Ono and Sandra Bloodworth, was awarded the Municipal Art Society of New York’s highest honor, the Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis Medal.

[129] In 1967, 20-year-old Smith left Glassboro State College (now Rowan University) and moved to Manhattan, where she began working at Scribner’s bookstore with friend and poet Janet Hamill.