Ron Smith (American poet)

Ron Smith is an American poet and the first writer-in-residence at St. Christopher's School in Richmond, Virginia.

He is the author of Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery, Moon Road, Its Ghostly Workshop, and The Humility of the Brutes. In 2005, he was selected, along with Elizabeth Seydel Morgan, as an inaugural winner of the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, "which is awarded each year to a poet with strong connections to the Commonwealth of Virginia." He now serves as a curator for the prize along with Morgan, David Wojahn, and Don Selby.

Smith's poems have appeared in periodicals, including The Nation, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and in anthologies from Wesleyan University Press, Time-Life Books, University of Virginia Press, University of Georgia Press, and University of Illinois Press.

His essay-reviews have appeared in The Kenyon Review and other magazines and reference works, most recently in The Georgia Review, Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts, and H-Arete. He is the regular poetry reviewer for The Richmond Times-Dispatch.

He is a former president of the Poetry Society of Virginia. Smith is a trustee for the Edgar Allan Poe Museum and sits on the board of directors for James River Writers.

From 2014 to 2016, he was Poet Laureate of Virginia.

Born in Savannah, Georgia, Smith moved to Richmond, Virginia, to play college football (some of his poems are about sports). He holds degrees (B.A., M.A., M.H., M.F.A.) from the University of Richmond and Virginia Commonwealth University in philosophy, English, general humanities, and creative writing. He has studied creative writing at Bennington College in Vermont, British drama at Worcester College, Oxford University, and Renaissance and modern culture and literature at the Ezra Pound Center for Literature in Meran, Italy.

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