Crystal Simone Smith

CRYSTAL SIMONE SMITH is an award-winning poet and educator. She is the author of Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound (Duke University Press, 2025), winner of the 2025 Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Award, and Dark Testament (Henry Holt, 2023). In 2022, her collection of haiku, Ebbing Shore, won The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. Smith is the recipient a Duke Humanities Unbounded Fellowship and her work has appeared in numerous journals including POETRY Magazine, Harper's Magazine, Rattle, Frogpond, Modern Haiku and The Heron's Nest. She teaches in the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University.