User:John Warner Smith/sandbox

{{UseSmith|John Warner Smith]] (talk) 20:46, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

John Warner Smith (born December 22, 1952) is an American poet and educator. He has published two collections of poetry: Soul Be A Witness (MadHat Press 2016) and A Mandala of Hands (Aldrich Press 2015).

Life, education, and career
Smith is a native of Morgan City, Louisiana and grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans. Smith also holds a Master of Business Administration from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, a B.S. in Accounting from McNeese State University, and a B.S. in Psychology from McNeese State. He teaches English at Southern University in Baton Rouge and is Chief Executive Officer of Education's Next Horizon, a statewide nonprofit organization dedicated to PreK-12 education reform in Louisiana. Prior to joining Education's Next Horizon, Smith worked as a banker for Chase. He also served as Louisiana Secretary of Louisiana in the administration of Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco and as Chief Administrative Officer for Lafayette City-Parish Consolidated Government.

Smith and his wife Narva live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Literary works
Smith's poems have appeared in literary journals across the country, including Ploughshares, Antioch Review, Callaloo, Transition, River Styx, and Quiddity. Smith poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Sundress Best of the Net Anthology.

About A Mandala of Hands, Terrance Hayes has written: "John Warner Smith’s terrific debut collection pays homage to histories near and far, familial and mythic. Neighbors become ancestors, ancestors become neighbors offering the “songs we never heard,” the songs we have yet to sing in these rich poems. Smith writes with an anthropologist’s precision and a griot’s reverence as he revives, recovers and reimagines the voices that unite us. A Mandala of Hands is a mature and magical new book."

About Soul Be A Witness, Thomas Sayers Ellis wrote: "This is how you upright Richard Wright. Redressed as courageous and urgent contemporary command, Soul Be A Witness carefully balances and re-injects the nutrient-like echoes of the Black Literary Tradition into our current state of soft, staged, formal phony literary legacy––as Heroic savior text and Neo Blue Print for New Black Fighting. For every stone history has cast at us, Soul Be A Witness casts three back in pure “Don’t Get It Twisted” fashion."

Published collections
A Mandala of Hands, Aldrich Press / Kelsay Books, 2015 ISBN 9780692415313

Soul Be A Witness, MadHat Press, 2016, ISBN 9781941196267