Full Name
John Warner Smith
Job Title
Executive Director
Company
Shadows-on-the-Teche
Speaking At
Speaker Bio
John Warner Smith was the Poet Laureate of Louisiana from 2019 to 2021 and is the only African American man to serve in the office in its 82-year history. Smith has published five collections of poetry, most recently Our Shut Eyes (MadHat Press, 2021). His novella, For All Those Men: When the KKK Threatened to Take Control of Louisiana, was published by UL Press in November 2022.
Smith’s sixth collection, From the Flinty Rock: New & Selected Poems, is forthcoming from MadHat Press in 2024.
A Cave Canem Fellow, Smith is a 2020 Poets Laureate Fellow of the Academy of American Poets and is winner of the 2019 Linda Hodge Bromberg Literary Award. He earned his MFA at the University of New Orleans.
Smith currently works as Executive Director at Shadows-on-the-Teche in New Iberia, Louisiana and is an Adjunct Instructor of African American Literature at Southern University in Baton Rouge.
Smith’s sixth collection, From the Flinty Rock: New & Selected Poems, is forthcoming from MadHat Press in 2024.
A Cave Canem Fellow, Smith is a 2020 Poets Laureate Fellow of the Academy of American Poets and is winner of the 2019 Linda Hodge Bromberg Literary Award. He earned his MFA at the University of New Orleans.
Smith currently works as Executive Director at Shadows-on-the-Teche in New Iberia, Louisiana and is an Adjunct Instructor of African American Literature at Southern University in Baton Rouge.
