Ethel Morgan Smith

Ethel Morgan Smith

Ethel Morgan Smith writes creative nonfiction and historical fiction. She has published three books: Path to Grace: Reimagining the Civil Rights Movement. (August 2023) winner of the 2023 Eudora Welty Prize; From Whence Cometh My Help: The African American Community at Hollins College (2000 & 2017); and Reflections of the Other: Being Black in Germany (2012). The African American Community at Hollins College has also been adapted for a play for the stage (African Violets).

She has also published in The New York Times, Callaloo, African American Review, University of Florida Journal, STIR Journal, Green Mountains Journal, Midnight & Indigo Journal, De Standaard (Brussels, Belgium), Connotation Press, Tusculum Review, Re-Visioning the Past: Historical Self-Reflexivity in American Short Fiction (Germany).

Since 2017 Smith has been emerita professor of English, West Virginia University, where she taught creative writing and African American, Women’s, and Southern literature. She has received the Eudora Welty Prize, Fulbright Scholar-Universität of Tübingen (Germany), Rockefeller Fellowship (Bellagio Italy), Visiting Artist-American Academy Rome, DuPont Fellow, Randolph College, Visiting Scholar-Women’s Studies Research Center-Brandies University, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Bread Loaf Fellowship, Two NEH grants (University of Kansas  and University of Louisiana-Lafayette).

She is presently working on Flowers Out of Bone, a work of historical fiction.