Students familiar with the foot-stompin’ music of ETSU’s bluegrass department or the roar of the trucks driving around campus will recognize the Southern prose poet R.T. Smith who will be reading on Wednesday at 7 p.m. in Room 225 of Nicks Hall.
Smith was honored with the Pulitzer Prize nomination for Trespasser and The Cardinal Heart and also received grants in literature from the National Endowment for the Arts, Arts International and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, according to the Academy of American Poets
“Smith’s themes have to do with growing up in the South and coming to terms with his Southern identity in a changing world,” said English professor Donald Johnson, who reviewed Smith’s collection, Cardinal Heart, for the Southern Humanities Review. “Pickup trucks appear, as do the accoutrements of country and bluegrass music, but if I were to choose one subject that dominates Smith’s work, it would be love.”
Smith’s recent collection of monologues, Uke Rivers Delivers, depicts a variety of Southern characters coming to grips with their inherit pasts, according to Louisiana State University Press. Characters include John Wilkes Booth’s killer, and a Confederate reenactor who gets a message from beyond the grave to bury the remains of Stonewall Jackson’s horse.
Nature is also a major theme in Smith’s literary work. He is an environmentalist in the sense that he respects the land, Johnson said. Depictions of landscapes include the American South and Ireland, which is illustrated in the Messenger.
Smith is currently the editor of Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review. This literary quarterly publishes well-established writers with international reputations as well as aspiring young writers with talent, Johnson said.
Though the English department is sponsoring the event, Smith’s reading isn’t only limited to English majors.
“Smith would appeal to any student who thinks about his or her place in the world, people who look beneath the surface of things, who love and think about language and who have any aspirations for becoming writers,” Johnson said.

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