Ron Smith, Poet Laureate of Virginia 2014–2016, is the author of The Humility of the Brutes, Its Ghostly Workshop and Moon Road, from Louisiana State University Press. The first edition of his Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery was judged “a close runner-up” for the National Poetry Series Open Competition by Margaret Atwood and was also judged runner-up for the Samuel French Morse Prize by Donald Hall. Winner of a number of prizes, including the Guy Owen Award from Southern Poetry Review and the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest, Smith’s poems have appeared in The Nation, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, New England Review, Shenandoah, Five Points, Blackbird, and many other periodicals. More that one hundred of his poems have been reprinted in anthologies and journals in the twenty-first century, including Helen Vender’s Poems, Poets, Poetry.

Bingham Guest Writer at Milton Academy in 2017, Smith has given readings of his poems from British Columbia to Dublin and London and beyond. He has read his poems about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington at Monticello and Mount Vernon; poems about Virginia history and landscape in the Virginia Senate and House of Delegates; poems set in Italy at the Keats-Shelley House and the U.S. Ambassador to Italy’s Official Residence in Rome; poems set in France on the Eiffel Tower and at the American Library in Paris, where he was the “Featured Poet” at the International Hemingway Conference in 2018. He has taught poetry and poetry writing at three universities. Poetry Editor for Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, he is also currently the Writer-in-Residence and George Squires Chair of Distinguished Teaching at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, Virginia.

Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery,
a poetry collection by Ron Smith,
is now available from MadHat Press.