BIO

Emma Smith-Stevens is the author of the acclaimed 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 subtly but profoundly glorious experiences that follow the onset of a cluster of autoimmune diseases soon after moving to a town where she’s dreamt of living, having marrying her beloved husband just months prior, and awaiting the publication of her first book. For the first time since developing manic depression at age 12, she was also in a years-long respite from psychosis—a state she views not as a simple illness but one of the fundamental conditions of being whom and what she is, as a young woman living a life of the mind.

With none of the ecstatic revelations and paranoia, music and cascading new awarenesses of madness, Smith-Steven’s sudden physical disability is deeply isolating, forcing her to vanish from her professional life and betray her creative self, ceaselessly wrestle with the U.S. healthcare system, and suffer alienation from society at large. There is a saying, “You are what you do;” but what if you can’t do? Smith-Stevens’ as yet untitled memoir is composed of emails (often to herself), text messages, social media posts, messages in hospital patient portals, notebook and journal entries, and other ephemera penned by the author during the years in which she believed herself unable to write.

She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two Azerbaijani street dogs.