Crystal Simone Smith

Smith at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.. Crystal Simone Smith is an American poet, scholar, and educator. She teaches academic writing at Duke University.

Education Born in Takoma Park, Maryland and educated in Prince George's County Schools, Smith relocated in her senior year of high school to North Carolina where she attended Bennett College and University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She completed a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Queens University of Charlotte in 2011.

Career Smith is a multifaceted poet who experiments across forms writing free verse, visual poetry, and Japanese forms with a central focus on the practice of haiku writing. Her work has appeared in POETRY Magazine, Rattle, Harper's Magazine, Frogpond, The Heron's Nest, and Modern Haiku.

In 2022, her collection of haiku, Ebbing Shore, won The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. In the same year, poems from Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound were set to music by composer Shawn Okpebholo. The songset premiered at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the subsequent contemporary classical album, Songs in Flight, was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2025.

Her publication Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound (Duke University Press) won the 2025 Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Award.

Smith is the 36th President of the Haiku Society of America; she was appointed in 2025.

Works

Ghost Woman: A Rising, 2027. Durham, NC: Duke University Press (forthcoming) ISBN 978-1478034087 Common Sense, 2026. Boston, MA: Beacon Press/Penguin Random House. (forthcoming) ISBN 978-0807023389 Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound, 2025. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-1478031819 Dark Testament, 2023. New York, NY: Henry Holt-MacMillan. ISBN 1250854369 Ebbing Shore, 2022. Haiku. Durham, NC: Horse & Buggy Press. ISBN 978-1478031819 Down To Earth, (chapbook) 2021. Longleaf Press. ISBN 978-1734398519 Running Music, (chapbook) 2014. Longleaf Press. ISBN 978-0982929094 Route's Home, (chapbook) 2013. Finishing Line Press. ISBN 978-1622293865

Awards and honors

Roanoke-Chowan Book Award, North Carolina Literary & Historical Association, 2025 Durham Arts Council Artist Support Grant, 2025 Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts, Pentaculum Writing Residency, 2025 The Children’s Book Council Notable Social Studies List Award, 2024 Missouri Association of School Librarians’ Dogwood Reading List, 2024 North Carolina Poetry Society Poetry of Courage Award, 2024 The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Distinguish Book Award, 2022 Duke University Humanities Unbounded Fellowship, 2020-2022 North Carolina Poetry Society Bloodroot Haiku Award, 1st place, 2019 Ashber Initiatives Literary Arts Grant Award, 2016