Jasmine Elizabeth Smith

Jasmine Elizabeth Smith (she/her) is a poet and educator from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She received her MFA in Poetry from the University of California in Riverside. She is a Cave Canem Fellow and a recipient of the Gluck’s Art Fellowship.

Jasmine Elizabeth’s poetic work is invested in the Diaspora of Black Americans in various historical contexts and eras and the uses of these historical flashpoints to interrogate contemporary and intersectional social, political, and environmental issues. Her work has been featured in Black Renaissance Noir, World Literature Today, POETRY, and LA Review of Book, and Kweli among others. Her debut collection South Flight (University of Georgia Press, 2022) was named a finalist for the 2020 National Poetry Series and is the 2020 Georgia Poetry Prize winner. She is currently working on her third poetry collection Park which interrogates what it means to be a Black woman navigating outdoor recreation spaces on the West Coast and its parallels and contradictions to the archives and narratives of the Black Buffalo soldiers who served as some of the first park and backcountry rangers in Yosemite and Sequoia National Park.

Smith currently works as an associate guest editor for the Black Earth Institute’s About Place Journal and currently serves on the 25th Anniversary Cave Canem Fellows and Faculty Committee while teaching a variety of English, poetry, and sustainability courses in her recent home of Seattle, Washington.