Birthday: North Carolina's Lee Smith is 71

Lee Smith (1944-  )

Author

Recipient, O. Henry Award

Recipient, American Academy of Arts & Letters Fiction Award

Recipient, North Carolina Award for Literature

Recipient, Sidney Lanier Prize for Southern Literature, Mercer University

Born to a store manager and a teacher in Grundy, Virginia, a village at the Kentucky border, Smith attended high school in Richmond then took a degree at Hollins College. There she showed early promise as a writer; in 1966 she won a fellowship from Book of the Month Club for the drafts of her first novel, which was published in 1968

Happily for American letters, a career path not taken was the one Lee Smith and classmate- and fellow writer Annie Dillard- took while at Hollins: go-go dancers for an all-woman band, The Virginia Woolfs.

Smith married an academic and lived in a variety of college towns before they settled in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1974. The couple divorced thereafter, and Smith took up a teaching post at NC State in Raleigh. Her 1983 novel, Oral History, vaulted her from regional, to nationally-known, writer. She has written fifteen novels and four collections of short stories. Her website is www.leemith.com.

Henry Bemis Books has an autographed first edition of Smith’s 2013 novel, Guests on Earth, listed at www.henrybemisbooks.blogspot.com.