Ron Smith
Ron Smith is the author of Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery, runner-up for the National Poetry Series Open Competition and the Samuel French Morse Prize (Margaret Atwood and Donald Hall, judges) and published by University Presses of Florida. His Moon Road: Poems 1986-2005 has just been issued by Louisiana State University Press, and has been praised by Pulitzer-winner Claudia Emerson and Pulitzer-finalist David Wojahn, as well as the Italian scholar and translator Massimo Bacigalupo and the world-famous journalist and novelist Tom Wolfe.
Ron Smith's poems have appeared in many periodicals, including The Nation, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and in a number of anthologies. His essays and reviews can be found in The Georgia Review, San Francisco Review of Books, Kenyon Review, and his poetry column Red Guitar at www.blackbird.vcu.edu.
Smith, a native of Savannah, Georgia, moved to Richmond, Virginia, to play college football. A number of his poems deal with the benefits, costs, values, and spectacle of sports.
Smith holds degrees in English, philosophy, general humanities, and creative writing from University of Richmond and Virginia Commonwealth University. He's also studied writing at Bennington College in Vermont; British drama at Worcester College, Oxford University; and Renaissance and modern culture and literature at the Ezra Pound Center for Literature in Merano, Italy. His awards and honors include the Theodore Roethke Poetry Prize, the Guy Owen Poetry Prize, a Bread Loaf Scholarship in Poetry, and a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellowship.
At St. Christopher's School, established in 1911, Ron Smith has held the George O. Squires Chair of Distinguished Teaching and is currently Writer-in-Residence, the first person ever to hold that title. In public and private schools, he conducts workshops in poetry for teachers and for students of all ages. At Mary Washington College, Virginia Commonwealth University, and University of Richmond, he has taught courses in creative writing, 20th century American poetry, and the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe.
In 2005, Ron was an inaugural winner of the $10,000 Carole Weinstein Prize in Poetry. In 2006 he became a Curator for that prize.
“Leaving Forever My son can look me level in the eyes now,and does, hard, when I tell him he cannot watchchainsaw murders at the midnight movie,that he must bend his mind to Biology,under this roof, in the clear light of a Tensor lamp.Outside, his friends throb with horsepowerunder the moon.He stands close, milk souron his breath, gauging the heat of my conviction,eye-whites pink from his new contacts.He can see me better than before. And I can seemyself in those insolent eyes, mostly headin the pupil's curve, closed in by the contoursof his unwrinkled flesh.At the window he wavesa thin arm and his buddies squall away in a glareof tail lights. I reach out my arm to his shoulder,but he shrugs free and shows me my father's narrow eyes,the trembling hand at my throat, the hard wallat the back of my skull, the raised fist framedin the bedroom window I had climbed through at three A.M."If you hit me I'll leave forever,"I said. But everything was fine in a few days, fine."I would have come back," I said, "false teeth and all."Now, twice a year after the long drive, in the yellow lightof the front porch, I breathe in my father's whiskey,ask for a shot, and see myself distorted inhis thick glasses, the two of us grinning,as he holds me with both hands at arm's length.”