BIO

He has written two novels, The Map of Who We Are (Oklahoma University Press, 1997), Annie’s Soup Kitchen (Oklahoma University Press, 2003), and two books of poetry, The Plain Talk of the Dead (Montparnasse Editions, 1988) and Other Sacred (Bald Trickster Press, 2023).  Smith has translated an anthology of modern Italian poetry, The New Italian Poetry: 1945 to the Present (University of California Press, 1981), a  novel from the Italian of Antonio Porta, The King of the Storeroom (Wesleyan University Press, 1992), the collected poems of Yang Mu (with Michelle Yeh), No Trace of the Gardener (Yale University Press, 1998), and edited an anthology of modern Italian poetry (with John Picchione) Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry: An Anthology (University of Toronto Press, 1993). His fiction, poetry, translations, and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, New American Writing, Kayak, The Chicago Review, The Iowa Review, SurVision, Sulfur, Gargoyle, Brilliant Corners, Otoliths, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Clade Song, Translation, Poetry East, Alfabeta, Nuovi Argomenti, Letteratura D’America, among other journals. From 2010 to 2021, Lawrence R. Smith edited Calibanonline (www.calibanonline.com), an international journal of literature and the arts. He edited and published its parent publication, Caliban, from 1986 to 1996, receiving three NEA grants (1989, 1990, and 1992) in support of the magazine. Caliban’s archives were purchased by the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. He was literary producer of a CD with readings by Maxine Hong Kingston, music by Jon Jang, in the Spoken Engine Series. He directed and co-wrote (with Deanne C. Smith) Truck Girl, a twenty minute short. It won the 2003 Award of Excellence for Short Features at the Berkeley Video and Film Festival. He was awarded a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Rome, 1973-74, a Fulbright-Hays Regional Research Fellowship, France and Italy, 1987, and a Michigan Council for the Arts Grant to complete a book of poems, 1987. Smith holds a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a B.A. in Painting from Eastern Michigan University.