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Leonora Smith
January 25, 2002
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Leonora
Smith was born between V-E and V-J day in Great Falls, Montana,
and spent the first six months of her life living in a dresser
drawer. A baby boomer and proud product of her generation,
Smith's formative years took her from the Eisenhower Administration
to the summer of love. Her poetry and fiction have appeared
in many journals and anthologies, including Contemporary
Michigan Poetry, Alaska Quarterly Review, Exquisite Corpse, and Nimrod.
A collection of her poetry, Spatial Relations, was published
in 2001. She won the 2002 Gwendolyn Brooks poetry prize (Society
for the Study of Midwestern Literature) for “Purple,” written
with support from her 2001 IRGP grant. She has been awarded
creative writing grants from the Michigan Council for the Arts
(fiction); the Virginia Studio Center; the Atlantic Center
for the Arts; the Banff Centre for the Arts; and from MSU. |
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Smith
has a dual Ph.D. in English and Curriculum from MSU, with an
emphasis on research
in the teaching of writing at the college level and above. With
stints as a waitress and bartender, she is now an associate professor
of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State
University. She has worked as a free-lance writer for government
and industry; as editor of Muses (the alumni magazine of MSU's
College of Arts & Letters); and as associate editor for Years
Press. She is on the editorial board of Fourth Genre.
"Smith’s versatility to move in and out of fiction
and reality, memory and present is impressive, as well as her
wit intellect around femininity...[her] use of descriptive,
colorful and imaginative language was a shot in the arm to
some mundane poetry that seems to have permeated the mainstream" -Una-Kariim,
City Pulse
For more information on Leonora Smith, please visit this website:
http://www.msu.edu/~wrac/faculty_staff/smith.html
To view Special Collections' holdings of Smith's work, please
click here.
To hear Smith read from her own work, please visit the Vincent
Voice Library, here.
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| Page Editor: BreezySilver |
Last Updated:
March 6, 2007
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