The recipient of the 2016-17 College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Alumni Award is Rod (R. T.) Smith. Smith graduated from Appalachian State University in ’75 with an M.A. in English and has since published 15 collections of poetry, six volumes of short fiction and three literary anthologies. He is the former editor of the Southern Humanities Review, as well as former alumni writer-in-residence at Auburn University. He is currently the writer-in-residence at Washington and Lee and has edited Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review since 1995, receiving a 2008 Virginia Governor’s Arts Award for publishing excellence.
Each year, the College of Arts and Sciences presents the Outstanding Alumni Award to a former student in the College. The award was instituted in 1998 to honor alumni who have distinguished themselves through their remarkable contributions to a profession, through their ability to provide leadership, through public service activities, through outstanding creative endeavors or through other accomplishments.
“Wherever R.T. Smith goes – and he tends to travel in rather rarified literary circles – he carries Appalachian’s banner with pride and honor and unabashed love. In the area of arts and letters, Appalachian can boast of no one with more prestige and talent, or more prolific, than R.T. Smith,” said Joseph Bathanti, Professor of Creative Writing at Appalachian.
In 1973, Smith had been teaching in Catawba and Mecklenburg County schools when he quit his job, retreated to Boone, North Carolina and founded the literary journal, Cold Mountain Review, which resulted in his creative M.A. thesis “Waking Under Snow” while at Appalachian. He was aided and abetted in his literary endeavors by English faculty members Mary Dunlop, John E. Trimpey, Thomas McGowan, Leon Lewis, John Foster West and Ronald Coulthard, along with art professor William Dunlap and fellow students, notably Donald Seacrest, Charles Frazier, Vic Moose and JoAnn Sprunt. Today he continues to be involved with Appalachian’s Cold Mountain Review publication, turning 45 this year.
“R.T. Smith was a member of a stable of young writers at Appalachian who thrived under the whimsical mentorship of John Foster West in the 1970s. He has gone on to a distinguished career as an award-winning poet and fiction writer, editor of important literary reviews, teacher and writer-in-residence and encourager of writers. But he has always maintained gracious loyalty to his writer friends and old teachers at Appalachian. What luck we've had ‘to see myth break to life’ and for him to remember our region and university so fondly,” recalled Professor Emeritus, Thomas McGowan, (Department of English at Appalachian).
Smith was born in Washington, D.C. in 1947, to a law enforcement officer and a hair dresser from Griffin, Georgia. He was raised and educated in Georgia and North Carolina, earning a B.A. in philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he has been honored as an outstanding alumnus, and an M.A. in English from Appalachian.
At intervals, Smith has taught semester courses as a guest writer-in-residence at Virginia Military Institute, Appalachian and Converse College. He most recently served as the Rachel Rivers-Coffey Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing for 2015-16 in the Department of English at Appalachian.
His teaching has included poetry writing at the undergraduate and graduate levels, fiction writing, literary editing, Southern literature, Appalachian literature, the Civil War in Literature, the American short story, novels of the American West, and surveys in world, American and British literature.
Smith’s work — both poems and fiction — has appeared in distinguished journals and magazines such as The Atlantic, The Southern Review, Writers Chronicle, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Yale Review, Poets & Writers, The Irish Times, Harvard Review, Oxford American, Appalachian Journal, Southern Quarterly and Lonzie’s Fried Chicken, to name a few. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts; received fellowships from the Alabama State Commission for the Arts; and has won the Cohen Prize from Ploughshares, as well as three Pushcart Prizes. He has been a fellow at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the Millay Colony for the Arts and the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland and Ossabaw Island.
A new poetry collection, “Summoning Shades” will appear next year from Mercer University Press. The South, the natural world, childhood and the work of James Dickey are often cited as influences on Smith’s works.
Smith has been married since 2001 to the poet and fiction writer Sarah Kennedy, who teaches at Mary Baldwin University and is the author of the Cross and the Crown Series of novels. They live and write on Timber Ridge in Rockbridge County, Virginia. Smith enjoys fishing, hiking, films, bluegrass and spoiling a three-year-old bluetick hound. He is a long-time devotee of Doc Watson and a cancer survivor. Smith currently blogs with his student interns at shenandoahliterary.org.
His favorite poem is Robert Penn Warren’s “Audubon: A Vision,” which he found in his desk in the Appalachian teaching assistant’s office when he came to Boone. The poem concludes,
“Tell me a story of deep delight.”
“No small challenge,” says Smith. “Decades on, I keep trying.”
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By Ellen Gwin Burnette
Oct. 25, 2017
BOONE, N.C.
About the Department of English
The Department of English at Appalachian State University is committed to outstanding work in the classroom, the support and mentorship of students, and a dynamic engagement with culture, history, language, theory and literature. It offers Master of Arts degrees in English and rhetoric and composition, as well as undergraduate degrees in literary studies, film studies, creative writing, professional writing and English education. Learn more at english.appstate.edu
About the College of Arts and Sciences
The College of Arts and Sciences is home to 16 academic departments, two stand-alone academic programs, two centers and one residential college. These units span the humanities and the social, mathematical and natural sciences. The College of Arts and Sciences aims to develop a distinctive identity built upon our university's strengths, traditions and unique location. Our values lie not only in service to the university and local community, but through inspiring, training, educating and sustaining the development of our students as global citizens. There are approximately 5,850 student majors in the college. As the college is also largely responsible for implementing Appalachian's general education curriculum, it is heavily involved in the education of all students at the university, including those pursuing majors in other colleges. Learn more at cas.appstate.edu.
About Appalachian State University
Appalachian State University, in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, prepares students to lead purposeful lives as global citizens who understand and engage their responsibilities in creating a sustainable future for all. The transformational Appalachian experience promotes a spirit of inclusion that brings people together in inspiring ways to acquire and create knowledge, to grow holistically, to act with passion and determination, and embrace diversity and difference. As one of 17 campuses in the University of North Carolina system, Appalachian enrolls about 18,000 students, has a low student-to-faculty ratio and offers more than 150 undergraduate and graduate majors.
Recipient of the 2016-17 College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Alumni Award is Rod (R. T.) Smith
Recipient of the 2016-17 College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Alumni Award is Rod (R. T.) Smith