About

Stephanie A. Smith - author, artist and academic.

Stephanie A. Smith – author, artist and academic.

About Stephanie A. Smith – A Summary

Stephanie A. Smith teaches literature and women’s studies at the University of Florida. She has been committed to writing ever since she was a student of Ursula K. Le Guin and has previously written two young adult fantasy novels – Snow Eyes and The Boy Who Was Thrown Away – and an adult science fiction novel Other Nature. Her work, both critical and fictional, investigates politics, science, literature, race and gender.

James Tiptree Jr. Award WinnerHer novel Other Nature was nominated in 1995 for The James Tiptree Jr. Award, the “annual literary prize for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender.”

James Tiptree Jr. Award Nominee 1995 (Other Nature)

Author’s Bio

Stephanie Smith took her PhD from Berkeley (1990), and attended the Haystack Creative Writing Workshop in 1981, with Ursula K. LeGuin. Prior to UF, she worked as a free-lance journalist, an editor for Western Imprints, an assistant at Glamour and Mademoiselle magazines; at Representations and at David Godine Publications, and is presently a consultant for Feminist Studies. A novelist, she is the author of: The Warpaint Trilogy, Warpaint (2012), Baby Rocket (2013) and Content Burns (2014) (Thames River Press); Other Nature (TOR,1995), which was short-listed for the Tiptree Award; The-Boy-Who-Was-Thrown-Away and Snow-Eyes (Atheneum 1985/87), along with a number of short stories, which have appeared in such magazines as New Letters, Asimov’s and SF&F. She has won multiple fiction residencies at the Martha’s Vineyard Writer’s Residency at the Noepe Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook, Norcroft, Provincetown and Dorland, and she has been featured in a number of magazines and online blogs.

Examining the intersection of science, literature, politics, race and gender, her essays appear in such journals as differences, Novel, Criticism, Genders, Genre, American Literature and American Literary History. A 1998 Visiting NEH Scholar at UCLA, she is the author of Conceived By Liberty: Maternal Figures and 19th-Century American Literature (Cornell 1995), nominated for the MLA First Book Award; Household Words (Minnesota, 2006) excerpts from both books have been reprinted in several collections. A creative non-fiction “A Meditation on Brit” appeared in Remaking Moby Dick an international multi-modal story-telling performance, both in print as a special edition of Pea River Journal (2013) and online. Currently, she is finishing a new critical book about aesthetics and the publishing industry in the United States, titled The Muse and The Marketplace, a chapter of which, “Union Blues: Melville’s Poetic In(ter)ventions,” is in the spring 2014 journal Genre; she is also finishing a new novel, Strange Grace.


Stephanie A. Smith has begun offering a writer’s consultation and manuscript reading service.

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