Crystal Simone Smith
American Poet
Crystal Simone Smith is an American poet, scholar, and educator. She teaches academic writing at Duke University.
Education
Born in Takoma Park, Maryland and educated in Prince George's County Schools, Smith relocated in her senior year of high school to North Carolina where she attended Bennett College and University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She completed a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Queens University of Charlotte in 2011.
Career
Smith is a multifaceted poet who experiments across forms writing free verse, visual poetry, and Japanese forms with a central focus on the practice of haiku writing. Her work has appeared in POETRY Magazine,Rattle, Harper's Magazine, Frogpond, The Heron's Nest, and Modern Haiku.
In 2022, her collection of haiku, Ebbing Shore, won The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. In the same year, poems from Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound were set to music by composer Shawn Okpebholo. The songset premiered at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the subsequent contemporary classical album, Songs in Flight, was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2025.
Her publication Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound (Duke University Press) won the 2025 Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Award.
The public source identifies “Crystal Simone Smith” as american Poet. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Crystal, Simone and Smith.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q137709690. VIAF identifies the subject as 249678625. The Library of Congress control number is no2012071545. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2011, 2022 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “Crystal Simone Smith” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.