Ron Smith is the author of four books of poetry, including The Humility of the Brutes (Louisiana State University Press, 2017), Its Ghostly Workshop (Louisiana State University Press, 2013), Moon Road: Poems 1986–2005 (Louisiana State University Press, 2007), and Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery (University of Central Florida Press, 1988). His poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Nation, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and in several anthologies. His awards include The Guy Owen Prize from Southern Poetry Review and The Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest. He was an inaugural winner of the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize and subsequently served for ten years as a curator for that prize. He is the poetry editor for Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature and Writer-in-Residence at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, Virginia, where he also holds the George O. Squires Chair of Distinguished Teaching. An early draft of Smith’s “Orvieto” (as two separate sonnets) was commissioned for a one-time oral presentation (with musical accompaniment) by Amherst Glebe Arts Response. On 22 October 2017, the sonnets were read aloud by Lynn Hanson as part of a concert in Amherst, Virginia.  

Photo by Eric Dobbs