R.T. Smith

R.T. Smith’s newest book, The Hollow Log Lounge (Illinois, 2003), was selected by Li-Young Lee as winner of the 2004 Maurice English Poetry Prize. His other books include Trespasser, Messenger and Brightwood, all from LSU Press. He has been awarded fellowships from the NEA and the Library of Virginia Poetry Prize. Smith’s poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Ploughshares and others. He edits Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review and lives with his wife, poet Sarah Kennedy, in Rockbridge County, Virginia.

You can read more about Smith & sample his poems at these online links:

• Interview & three poems (both text and audio) in The Cortland Review, Issue 3.
• “Crawdads on the Styx” & “The Perils of Censorship” posted in the archives of Blackbird.
• Four poems from Messenger published in StorySouth.
• “Hardware Sparrows” posted on the R.T. Smith page at the Academy of American Poets.

He writes of his experience as this year’s IBPC Poem of the Year judge:

I congratulate these three and many of the other poets and thank them for a pleasurable tour through a year of poems.

(NOTE: Smith was choosing from the 24 poems selected as monthly 1st and 2nd place winners in the IBPC from May 2004 through April 2005, all of which are posted here in our archive of InterBoard Poetry Competition winners.)

---

Back to the poems of the year
Archive of Winning Poems from the IBPC

---

---