Crystal Simone Smith

Durham, North Carolina


Crystal Simone Smith is an award-winning poet, indie-publisher, and educator. She was born in Takoma Park, Maryland, received an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina, and now lives in Durham, North Carolina. She is the author of three chapbooks of longer poetry: Down to Earth (Longleaf Press, 2021), Running Music (Longleaf Press, 2014), and Routes Home (Finishing Line Press, 2013). Crystal is also the author of Dark Testament (Henry Holt, 2023), a collection of blackout poems about Black Lives Matter derived from the novel Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. Her book Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound will be published by Duke University Press in 2025. She teaches in the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University and writes poetry about the human condition and social change.

Crystal’s work has been widely published in such journals as Prairie Schooner, Callaloo, Nimrod, African-American Review, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Crab Orchard Review, and Poetry Magazine, and anthologized in numerous poetry collections. She is also the founder and managing editor of Backbone Press, which publishes emerging and established poets with a focus on advancing the voices of writers of color, and has also published nine collections of haiku.

In 2015, Crystal was the first recipient of the Ashber Initiatives Literary Grant, which funded Wildflowers: Haiku, Senryu, and Haiga (2016), a limited-edition letterpress book of traditional Japanese poetry and art. Her poem “plantation tour” took second place in the North Carolina Poetry Society (NCPS) Griffin-Farlow Haiku Award in 2014 and her poem “slave museum” won first place in the NCPS Bloodroot Haiku Award in 2019. Crystal’s coauthored One Window’s Light: A Collection of Haiku (Unicorn Press, 2017), edited by Lenard D. Moore, was awarded the first place Merit Book Award for best haiku anthology by the Haiku Society of America. In 2022, her collection of haiku, Ebbing Shore (Horse & Buggy Press, 2022) was awarded the Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. Other selected poems of Crystal’s have been named either finalist or honorable mention in the 2012 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the 2017 Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, and the 2018 James Applewhite Poetry Award. She also serves on the editorial board of Juxtapositions: Research and Scholarship in Haiku.

 

 


white wildflowers

I decide to stop

hiding my gray

Frogpond

 

winter beach

a golden retriever

runs off his leash

Modern Haiku

 

spring break

my boys screaming

at blue jays

Wildflowers: Haiku, Senryu, Haiga

 

ginkgo tree

how to skip the class

I teach

Wildflowers: Haiku, Senryu, Haiga

 

plantation tour—

I follow a swallowtail

to the slave house

Pinesong and The Wanderer Brush

 

weight gain

he suggests we buy

a bigger house

Wildflowers: Haiku, Senryu, Haiga

 

organic shop—

too broke to be

a hippie

Modern Haiku

 

bleeding sunset

I mourn another

fetus with her

The Heron’s Nest

 

another mass shooting

my son practices

his trumpet solo

One Window’s Light


foreclosure

the garden Buddha

belly up

The Heron’s Nest