Mark Smith-Soto

Professor of Spanish

Education: I received my B.A. in English (summa cum laude) from the University of Maryland (College Park) in 1970, and my M.A. (1972) and Ph.D. (1975) in comparative literature (Spanish, English) from the University of California at Berkeley.

I have published two books and various articles on late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Spanish-American poetry but my teaching has ranged beyond my area of specialization to include World Literature, Western Civilization, and creative writing seminars at the graduate and undergraduate level. Having been raised bilingually, I am fascinated by the practice and theory of translation, and have for many years served on the editorial staff of our department's literary magazine, International Poetry Review.

A poet myself, my work has appeared in Nimrod, Carolina Quarterly, The Sun, Poetry East, Quarterly West, Americas Review, Callaloo, Chattahoochee Review, Literary Review, Kenyon Review  and various other literary magazines. My poetry chapbook Green Mango Collage, winner of the North Carolina Writers' Network Year 2000 Persephone Competition, was published by Birch Brook Press. Another poetry collection, Shafts, won the North Carolina Writers' Network's 2001 Randall Jarrell-Harperprints Poetry Competition. My first full-length collection of poetry, Our Lives Are Rivers, was published by Florida University Press in the summer of 2003.

As a final note, I would add that my abiding love for the theatre has lately led me into the field of playwriting. Two of my ten minute plays have been produced locally by the Greensboro Playwrights' Forum, and another, Deal With This: Trio From The Holocaust Museum, was produced by Theatre Orange of the Arts Center of Carrboro and Chapel Hill as one of ten winners of their 2003 "Ten by Ten in the Triangle" festival competition.

Return to the UNCG Home Page