Teaching Assistant Professor
1997, MFA Writing (Fiction), Sarah Lawrence College
1994, BA English with Highest Honors in Creative Writing, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Bio
Julia Ridley Smith is the author of The Sum of Trifles, a memoir in essays, and Sex Romp Gone Wrong, a short story collection. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Ecotone, Electric Literature, the New England Review, and The Southern Review, among other publications, and her nonfiction was recognized as notable in The Best American Essays 2019. She’s been awarded scholarships, fellowships, and residencies by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, the Cuttyhunk Island Residency, and the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities. After earning her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, she worked for nearly twenty years as a freelance copyeditor of academic books. She’s taught creative writing and literature at UNC Greensboro, as well as art-based writing workshops for educators and other adults at the Weatherspoon Art Museum. She was the 2021-22 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
To read more, visit my websitePublications:
- Sex Romp Gone Wrong: Stories (Blair, forthcoming, 2024)
- The Sum of Trifles (University of Georgia Press, 2021)
- “The Woman Who Did Things Wrong.” Copper Nickel, Spring 2023, Issue 36
- “Flown.” Cincinnati Review 19.2. Fall 2022.
- “Legs.” Ecotone, 2018. Selected as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2019.
- “A Miniature for My Mother.” New England Review, 2017.
Awards
Cos Barnes Fellowship in Fiction, Weymouth Center, Southern Pines, NC, 2020. Regional Artist’s Grant, United Arts Council of Greater Greensboro, NC, 2011, 2016, 2020. Fellow, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sweet Briar, VA. 2002-2019. Crossfield Fellow, Cuttyhunk Island Writers’ Residency, Cuttyhunk, MA, 2017. Tennessee Williams Scholar in Fiction, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, 2005. Residency, Millay Colony for the Arts, Austerlitz, NY, 2001.
Courses Taught:
- ENGL 130: Introduction to Fiction Writing
- ENGL 132H: Honors Introduction to Fiction Writing
- ENGL 138: Introduction to Creative Nonfiction
- ENGL 206: Intermediate Fiction Writing
- ENGL 208: Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction–Encounters with Art and Objects
- ENGL 404: Advanced Creative Nonfiction