Stephanie A. Smith
Stephanie A. Smith is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida, and is the author of three novels. Her most recent novel, Other Nature, appeared in 1997 (TOR/St. Martin's), the other two are young-adult fantasy -- Snow Eyes and The Boy Who Was Thrown Away, both by Atheneum.
She is also the author of Conceived By Liberty: Maternal Figures and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cornell 1995), which was her dissertation project when she worked on her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. Her fiction has appeared in Asimov's and in anthologies such as A Space of Her Own; her scholarly work has appeared in American Literature, Genders, Criticism, and in anthologies such as Cambridge's New Essays on Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave
Girl and Harold Bloom's collection on Henry James's Portrait of a Lady. Her most recent work, "Suckers" has appeared in a special issue on Eating and Disorder of differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies (10.1).
"As an undergraduate at Boston University, majoring in English and Latin, I eschewed the creative writing program when it became clear to me that under the direction of Leslie Epstein, the sort of dream-world excursions I found most compelling as a young reader/writer were not welcome.
Instead, I wrote on my own, took workshops at adult school, worked for David Godine Pubishers, and finally went to study with Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre and Elizabeth Lynn at Portland State's Haystack program in the summer of 1981. This was a great experience; Ursula and Vonda have remained close friends and I then moved to Portland, at their urging, to write. There I met Molly Gloss and Percival Everertt two writers who have also had an impact on my work; and I wrote my two young adult novels there, as well as numerous short stories (only two have appeared in print) while working first at Willamette Week (where I met and was also influenced by Susan Orlean), and then at the Oregon Historical Society as an editor. Finally, I decided that I did also want to pursue a PhD and thus went to Berkeley.
While at Berkeley, I began to draft OTHER NATURE and my PhD dissertation at the same time (they were finally published in the same year). At Berkeley, I met a lot of writers but only one stands out in my mind: Toni Morrison. Morrison had just finished Beloved when I met her. She was generous enough to talk to neophytes like myself and although she encouraged me to do both academic criticism and fiction, she made no bones about how much resistance I would encounter and how much trouble it was going to get me into--as it has. SFers look askance at a cultural critic; critics look askance at SF. In my own home department, teaching creative writing is not something the department encourages me to do.
Currently, I'm working on a new novel, having spent some time talking and working with two new writers whom I admire, Nancy Reisman, a colleage here at UF and Michael Cunningham; and I am working on a new critical book.
Books:
Snow Eyes
The Boy Who Was Thrown Away
Other Nature
Author's Homepage:
www.sff.net/people/blue.smith/
http:// www.sff.net/people/blue.smith/
email: blue.smith@sff.net
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