Dale Martin Smith was born in Garland, Texas, in 1967, graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1990, and lived in the Republic of Yemen as a Peace Corps volunteer before moving to San Francisco to study poetry at the New College of California (MA, 1996). Smith published Mike & Dale’s Younger Poets in San Francisco and, with Hoa Nguyen, edited the little magazine and book imprint Skanky Possum from their home in Austin. To support the press, Smith worked a series of day jobs, wrote regularly for newspapers, and began teaching for a local community college before completing a doctorate in English at UT Austin in 2011. Smith maintained close ties with an intergenerational group of poets, published poetry, reviews, and essays in small press publications throughout North America, and with Nguyen facilitated a community of poets and artists, hosting readings and events for luminaries like Alice Notley, Anne Waldman, and Eileen Myles. He is the author of the poetry collections The Size of Paradise (knife|fork|book, 2024), longlisted for the 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize; Flying Red Horse (Talonbooks, 2021); Slow Poetry in America (Cuneiform Press, 2014); Susquehanna (Punch Press, 2008), Black Stone (effing press, 2007); and American Rambler (Thorp Springs, 2000). In 2011, he moved to Canada to teach at Toronto Metropolitan University. In addition to his poetry, Smith has drawn attention to twentieth and twenty-first century poets through critical and editorial contributions in Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960 (University of Alabama Press, 2012) and three edited editions: That Tongue Be Time: Norma Cole and a Continuous Making (University of New Mexico Press, 2025), An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson (University of New Mexico Press, 2017), and Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson (University of New Mexico Press, 2017). His essays and poetry have appeared in Poetry, The Walrus, Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, and Jacket Magazine. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.

(Photo credit: Hoa Nguyen)