R. T. Smith was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Georgia and North Carolina. He attended Georgia Tech, graduated with a B.A. in Philosophy from UNCC and received a M.A. in English from Appalachian State University, where he founded Cold Mountain Review. For nineteen years he taught at Auburn University, serving as Alumni Writer-in-Residence for twelve years and holding many positions, including the co-editorship, at Southern Humanities Review. Since 1995 Smith has served as editor of Shenandoah for Washington and Lee University, where he also teaches creative writing and literature courses.
Smith's collections of stories are Faith and Uke Rivers Delivers; his collections of poetry include The Cardinal Heart, Trespasser, Split the Lark, Messenger, The Hollow Log Lounge and Brightwood. A new collection is forthcoming from the University of Arkansas Press. His fiction has appeared in The Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South (2002, 2004 & 2006) and Best American Mystery Stories, as well as Missouri Review, Southern Review, Zoetrope and Quarterly West, and his poems have appeared in The Pushcart Prize (2003 & 2006), Atlantic Monthly, Georgia Review, and Gettysburg Review. He has received the Cohen Prize from Ploughshares, the Guy Owen Prize from Southern Humanities Review and the Richard Hugo Prize from Poetry Northwest. Split the Lark was awarded the International Poetry Prize from Salmon Publishing, Messenger was named Poetry Book of the Year by the Library of Virginia and in 2004 Li-Young Lee chose The Hollow Log Lounge as winner of the Maurice English Prize. One of Smith's short stories was in the trio which won the 2006 National Magazine Award in Fiction for Virginia Quarterly Review. Smith has received fellowships from the Alabama State Council for the Arts, the N.E.A., the Virginia Arts Commission and Arts Council.
Smith lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia with his wife, the poet Sarah Kennedy, with whom he co-edited the anthology Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets of Virginia. He is currently working on a novel and polishing up a new collection of short fiction to be called Ina Grove and Other Stories.
On editing a literary journal:
* The Book of Isaiah says, 'Butter and honey shall he eat that he may refuse the bitter and chose the good,' and I've tried to consume my fill of those magical substances, just incase. Whether they've helped or not, I can't be sure.
* Explaining her own reading habits, Flannery O'Connor wrote, 'I don't have a lot of time. I can give a poem a couple of lines, a short story a paragraph, and a novel a few pages, then if I can stop reading without a sense of loss, I do, and I go on to something else.' That's pretty extreme, but it does approximate the necessary responses to mountains of submissions. Of course, that sense of loss is not infrequent, so Miss O'Connor's practice just winnows out 80-90%, and the remaining hundreds of manuscripts keep me off the streets and, mostly, out of trouble.
* I've never found a better explanation for choosing a 'literary career' than this quotation from Scott Russell Sanders' Amos and James, which we printed in my first issue as editor of Shenandoah: 'The work of language deserves our greatest care, for the tongue's power may devour the world, or light the way.
