R.T. Smith

R. T. Smith is Writer-in-Residence at Washington and Lee University, where he is in his twenty-third year of editing Shenandoah. He is the author of fourteen collec-tions of poetry, including Library of Virginia Book of the Year winners Messenger (2001) and Outlaw Style (2007), as well as the recent In the Night Orchard: New and Selected Poems (Texas Review Press, 2014). His poems have appeared in Best Amer-ican Poetry 2017, the Pushcart Prize anthology, Poetry 180, and many anthologies. His new poetry collection, Summoning Shades, is forthcoming from Mercer Univer-sity Press. Smith is also the author of six collections of stories, with individual works appearing in Best American Short Stories, Fiction 100, Best American Mystery Sto-ries, and six volumes of New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best. The recipient of the Missouri Review’s 2017 William Peden Prize for Fiction, he lives with his wife, the novelist Sarah Kennedy, on Timber Ridge in Rockbridge County, Virginia.