BIO

Emma Smith-Stevens is the author of an award-winning novel, The Australian (Dzanc Books), and a forthcoming short story collection, Greyhounds (Dzanc Books).

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, the 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 others. 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 lives with multiple autoimmune disorders and bipolar I disorder, and she advocates passionately for equity, dignity, universal healthcare, and freedom from stigma and all forms of violence targeting people with disabilities. Her experiences within the U.S. healthcare system and society at large as a woman with severe mental illness since age 12 and over a decade of life-changing, systemic physical diseases increasingly inform her writing, whether as its subject or from more of a slant. She lives in Brooklyn, New York and is writing a memoir.