Author Bio
• Birth—November 1, 1944
• Where—Grundy, Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A. Hollins College
• Awards—O. Henry Award (twice) (more below)
• Currently—lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina
Lee Smith is an American fiction author who typically incorporates much of her background from the Southeastern United States in her works. Her novel The Last Girls was listed on the New York Times bestseller's list and won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award.
Early life and education
Lee Smith was born in 1944 in Grundy, Virginia, a small coal-mining town in the Appalachian Mountains, less than 10 miles from the Kentucky border. The Smith home sat on Main Street, and the Levisa Fork River ran just behind it. Her mother, Gig, was a college graduate who had come to Grundy to teach school. Her father, Ernest, was the owner and operator of a Ben Franklin store in Grundy.
Growing up in the Appalachian Mountains of southwestern Virginia, nine-year-old Lee Smith was already writing—and selling, for a nickel apiece—stories about her neighbors in the coal boomtown of Grundy and the nearby isolated "hollers."
After spending her last two years of high school at St. Catherine's School in Richmond, Virginia, Smith enrolled at Hollins College in Roanoke. She and fellow student Annie Dillard (the well-known essayist and novelist) became go-go dancers for an all-girl rock band, the Virginia Woolfs. In 1966, her senior year at Hollins, Smith submitted an early draft of a coming-of-age novel to a Book-of-the-Month Club contest and was awarded one of twelve fellowships. Two years later, that novel, The Last Day the Dog Bushes Bloomed (1968), became Smith's first published work of fiction.
Following her graduation from Hollins, Smith married James Seay, a poet and teacher, whom she accompanied from university to university as his teaching assignments changed. They had two sons. In 1981, however, the marriage broke up, and she accepted a teaching job at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where she taught for many years. In 1985, by then divorced from Seay, married journalist Hal Crowther. The couple currently lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.
Writing
Since 1968, Smith has published fifteen novels, as well as four collections of short stories, and has received eight major writing awards including the Sidney Lanier Prize for Southern Literature in 2013.
Novels
1968 - The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed
1971 - Something in the Wind
1980 - Black Mountain Breakdown
1983 - Oral History
1985 - Family Linen
1988 - Fair and Tender Ladies
1992 - The Devil's Dream
1995 - Saving Grace
1996 - The Christmas Letters
2003 - The Last Girls
2006 - On Agate Hill
2013 - Guests on Earth
Short story collections
1981 - Cakewalk
1990 - Me and My Baby View the Eclipse
1997 - News of the Spirit
2010 - Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger
Memoir
2016 - Dimestore: A Writer’s Life
Recognition
Smith has received numerous writing awards, including the O. Henry Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and the Mercy University Sidney Lanier Prize for Southern Literature (the first recipient.) (Author bio from Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/30/2016.)