BIO

Emma Smith-Stevens is the author of a novel, The Australian (Dzanc Books), and a short story collection, Greyhounds, coming in October 2026.

After growing up in Downtown Manhattan, Smith-Stevens worked as a server at a pancake house in Delray Beach, Florida, a department store gift-wrapper in Boca Raton, a personal assistant in Beverly Hills, a scriptwriter for virtual patients used by nursing students, and has taught writing and literature at the University of Florida, Santa Fe College, and the Bard Prison Initiative.

Smith-Stevens' writing has been published in BOMB Magazine, Lit Hub, Catapult, The Rumpus, Wigleaf, Evergreen Review, Subtropics, Southampton Review, Joyland, Conjunctions, the New York Times bestselling and Lambda Literary award-winning anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches From Rape Culture (Ed. Roxane Gay, Harper Collins), Against Death: 35 Essays on Living (Ed. Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Anvil Press), and elsewhere. Her work received a Special Mention in The Pushcart Prize XL: Best of the Small Presses, was selected as a Notable Essay in the 2021 Best American Essays (Ed. Alexander Chee), and was twice included in Wigleaf 's Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions. She holds a B.A. in literature from Bard College and an M.F.A. in fiction writing from the University of Florida.

Smith-Stevens is writing a memoir chronicling the brutal, at times humorous, often annihilating, and occasionally glorious experiences that follow the onset of a cluster of debilitating autoimmune diseases. As yet untitled, the book is composed of emails (often to herself), text messages, social media posts, communications in hospital patient portals, notebook and journal entries, and other ephemeral words penned by the author during the decade in which she believed herself unable to write.

Removed from professional life and forced to betray her creative self, wrestling with the U.S. healthcare system, and alienated from friendships, family, and society at large, Smith-Stevens faced questions that, sooner or later, find us all. In our late capitalist culture there is a saying, “You are what you do.” What if you can’t do? The memoir chronicles Smith-Stevens’ desperate search for answers, exploring what comprises identity, how we make meaning of suffering, and what matters most.

Smith-Stevens lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two street dogs from Baku, Azerbaijan.