Bruce Smith

Read poems by this poet

Bruce Smith was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from Bucknell University.

Smith is the author of six poetry collections, including Devotions (University of Chicago Press, 2011), which was the recipient of the 2012 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. His second collection, Silver and Information (University of Georgia Press, 1985), was selected by Hayden Carruth as the winner of the National Poetry Series.

Smith’s honors include the Discovery/The Nation prize and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2010, he received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2014, he was named a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

Smith has taught at Boston, Harvard, and Tufts universities, as well as at Portland State, Lewis & Clark College, and the University of Alabama. In 2002, he joined the faculty at the University of Syracuse, where he is a professor of English. He lives in Syracuse, New York.