Poet, memoirist, and novelist John Warner Smith began writing creatively while building a successful career as a public administrator and corporate banker. Now retired, Smith’s professional work included being the top administrator of a city-county government, a state cabinet head, a leader of a statewide non-profit education advocacy organization, and director of a plantation house museum that was a former site of enslavement.
Smith is a former Poet Laureate of Louisiana (2019-2021) and the only African American male to serve in the office in its eighty-three history. He has published five collections of poetry, most recently Our Shut Eyes by MadHat Press in 2021. His sixth collection, From the Flinty Rock: New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming from MadHat Press in late summer of 2025.
In November 2022, Smith published his first novella, For All Those Men: When the KKK Threatened to Take Control of Louisiana, with UL Press. In December 2024, he published Sisters of Gavinville, his first full-length novel, with Between the Lines Publishing. I, Too, Am Tab Baby, his memoir, will be published by Legacy Book Press in March 2025.
Smith earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans Low-Residency MFA Program, where he completed summer residencies in San Miguel, Mexico and Edinburgh, Scotland. Upon completing the MFA, he received a three-year fellowship to attend the prestigious Cave Canem Retreat. He is also a three-year fellow of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop.
Smith’s poems have appeared in numerous literary journals across the country. His first book-length manuscript was a finalist in the 2013 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award competition. His poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and for the Best of the Net Anthology. In 2019, Smith won the Linda Hodge Bromberg Literary Award, and in 2020 he was awarded a $50,000 poet laureate fellowship by the Academy of American Poets.
In addition to holding the Master of Fine Arts degree, Smith has earned a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He earned two undergraduate degrees at McNeese State University: a Bachelor of Science in Accounting and a Bachelor of Science in Psychology.
Since 2011, Smith has been an adjunct instructor of African American Literature at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.