blackbird spring 2002 vol.1 no. 1

POETRY

RON SMITH

Ron Smith is Writer-in-Residence at St. Christopher's School in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery, judged "a close second" for the National Poetry Series Open Competition by Margaret Atwood. The book's title poem was awarded Southern Poetry Review's Guy Owen Award by judge Linda Pastan, and the collection was subsequently published by University Presses of Florida. Smith's poems have also won Poetry Northwest's Theodore Roethke Prize, and in 2000 his poem "The Teachers Pass the Popcorn" was nominated by The Georgia Review for a Pushcart Prize. More than a hundred of his poems have appeared in periodicals, including The Nation, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, College English, and Kansas Quarterly, and in anthologies published by Wesleyan University Press, Time-Life Books, The University of Georgia Press, and University of Illinois Press. Most recently, his eighteen-piece poetic sequence "To Ithaca" appeared in the Summer 2002 issue of The Georgia Review.  

Photo by Eric Dobbs