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Ron Smith

Author profile

born

Savannah, Georgia, The United States

gender

male

website

http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu

genre

Poetry

About this author

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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 foun...more 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.(less)

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Books by Ron Smith

Average rating: 3.94 · 175 ratings · 27 reviews · 90 distinct works

	The Ballpark Book 3.46 avg rating — 13 ratings — 2 editions	My rating:
	Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery: Poems 4.00 avg rating — 5 ratings — published 1988	My rating:
	Moon Road: Poems, 1986-2005 4.50 avg rating — 4 ratings — published 2007	My rating:
	The Sporting News Selects Baseball's 100 Greatest Players: A Celebration of the 20th Century's Best by Ron Smith, Sporting News 3.50 avg rating — 4 ratings — published 1998	My rating:
	Hooked on the Word: Changing Your Life Through Bible Meditation 3.00 avg rating — 3 ratings — published 1994	My rating:
	Celebrating 70: Mark McGwire's Historic Season by Ron Smith, Dave Kindred, Mike Eisenbath 2.75 avg rating — 4 ratings — published 1998 — 2 editions	My rating:
	Baseball Chatter: Favorite Baseball Stories From The Game Insiders 3.00 avg rating — 2 ratings	My rating:
	Torpedoman 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 1993	My rating:
	Dear Paul, Am I on the Right Track? 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 1996	My rating:
	The Abc Of Follow Up 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating — 2 editions	My rating:

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Quotes by Ron Smith

“Leaving Forever

My son can look me level in the eyes now,
and does, hard, when I tell him he cannot watch
chainsaw 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 horsepower
under the moon.

He stands close, milk sour
on 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 see
myself in those insolent eyes, mostly head
in the pupil's curve, closed in by the contours
of his unwrinkled flesh.

At the window he waves
a thin arm and his buddies squall away in a glare
of 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 wall
at the back of my skull, the raised fist framed
in 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 light
of the front porch, I breathe in my father's whiskey,
ask for a shot, and see myself distorted in
his thick glasses, the two of us grinning,
as he holds me with both hands at arm's length.”
― Ron Smith, Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery: Poems

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