Volume 1, Number 2, August 2003

Nancy Stewart Smith

Born in Chicago to a fundamentalist, teaching mother, who claimed Mark Twain kin, and an agnostic philosopher father, who claimed Jesse James, what could I do but write? And write I have, in a variety of forms, published in a variety of media. I sought little recognition, yet found some along the way. None were greater surprises than when at fourteen I was publicly accused by a teacher of plagiarizing a poem I’d written, except perhaps when at seventeen I received notice from the Atlantic Monthly that another poem, submitted to a contest by another teacher, had won an Honorable Mention.