Jordan Smith is the author of eight books of poems, most recently Little Black Train (winner of the Three Mile Harbor Press Poetry Prize), Clare’s Empire, a fantasia on the life and work of John Clare from The Hydroelectric Press, and The Light in the Film, The Names of Things Are Leaving, and For Appearances, all from the University of Tampa Press. His earlier books appeared from Princeton University Press, Wesleyan University Press, and Copper Beech Press, and his chapbooks are from The Pudding Press, Right Hand Pointing, and Swan Scythe. His poems have been published in a wide range of literary journals, including Agni, Antaeus, Poetry, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review.
The recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and The New York Foundation for the Arts, and of the Swan Scythe and Tampa Review poetry prizes, he holds graduate degrees from the writing programs at The Johns Hopkins University and The University of Iowa.
With his wife, Malie, he lives in upstate New York, where he is the Edward Everett Hale Jr., Professor of English at Union College. His work has been strongly influenced by the visual arts, and especially by his association with Walter Hatke, whose paintings appear on two of his book covers and to whose catalogues he has contributed an essay and a set of poems. Their most recent project, Hat & Key, is a limited set of broadsides combining image and text.