Landiss Series to present free program featuring acclaimed Southern poet

Janel Shoun | 

Lipscomb University’s spring Landiss Lecture program will feature R.T. "Rod" Smith, acclaimed poet and editor of Shenandoah, the literary magazine of Washington and Lee University. Smith’s talk and poetry reading will be held at 7:30 p.m., March 27 in the Doris Swang Chapel in the Ezell Center on campus. The program is free and open to the public.

“R.T. Smith is a jack of all trades in literature: a professor, fiction and non-fiction writer, poet and editor, and he has received accolades in all these fields,” said Matthew Hearn, chair of the Lipscomb English department, which sponsors the annual Landiss Lecture series. “His literary journal Shenandoah is one of the most respected literary journals in the U.S.”

Smith’s post-war Southern upbringing in Georgia and North Carolina comes out strongly in his poetry and should be easy for Nashville audiences to relate to, Hearn said.

“His topics include subjects such as going to the drive-in as a boy with his parents and living with the South’s deeply imbedded history of racial conflict. He has a real understanding of what it feels like to be conflicted about where you are from,” he said. “In addition, he has a real gift for vivid, concrete language.”

Smith’s latest work, Outlaw Style (available from University of Arkansas Press) is a collection of narrative and lyric poems exploring the landscape and culture of the American South. Several poems address the history of American racial intolerance; others explore the roots and impact of traditional music; and still others question the nature of spirituality.

“Smith… has an ear for the Southern vernacular and a fondness for eccentric – if not grotesque – characters,” stated a July 2006 Kirkus Reviews write-up on Smith’s Uke Rivers Delivers, his most recent collection of short stories. “At their best, these flavorful pieces reside firmly in the tradition of great Southern storytelling.”

Smith's collections of stories are Faith and Uke Rivers Delivers. His collections of poetry include The Cardinal Heart, Trespasser, Split the Lark, Messenger, The Hollow Log Lounge and Brightwood.

His fiction has appeared in The Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South (2002, 2004 & 2006). His poems have appeared in The Pushcart Prize(2003 & 2006),Atlantic Monthly, Georgia ReviewandGettysburg Review.
 
Smith received a master’s in English from Appalachian State University, where he founded Cold Mountain Review. For nineteen years he taught at Auburn University, serving as Alumni Writer-in-Residence for twelve years and holding many positions, including the co-editorship, at Southern Humanities Review. Since 1995 Smith has served as editor of Shenandoah for Washington and Lee University, where he also teaches creative writing and literature courses.

The Landiss Lecture Series was established 22 years ago by the late Morris P. Landiss, long-time chair of the Lipscomb University Department of English. He dreamed of bringing to the campus practicing writers, critics and scholars of national reputation to challenge the minds of those in Lipscomb’s academic community and in the community at-large.

In the years since the series first presentation in 1985, the lectures have drawn such notable speakers as Bret Lott, George Garrett, Terry Kay, John Egerton, Wilma Dykeman, Robert Massie, Unita Blackwell, Sena Jeter Naslund, and many others.