Austin Smith was born on a family dairy farm in northwestern Illinois. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Yale Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, 32 Poems, and many other publications.
His first collection, Almanac, was published through the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. His forthcoming collection, Flyover Country, will be published by Princeton in September 2018 through the same series. His new book takes issue with the idea of the Midwest as mere “flyover country,” while also challenging American foreign policy, particularly in regards to preemptive war and drone strikes.
Smith received his BA in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an MA in Poetry from the University of California-Davis, and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Virginia. From 2012 to 2014 he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford, where he teaches poetry, fiction, environmental literature and documentary journalism. When he isn’t teaching he lives in a hundred-and-twenty year-old farmhouse with a black lab named Wendell near Schapville, Illinois, where they hope to establish an artists’ residency called Driftless Artist House.