WTAW Press recently announced the forthcoming publishing of Delta State University professor Mike Smith\u2019s full-length book, \u201cAnd There Was Evening and There Was Morning.\u201d<\/p>\n
The book, to be published this fall, is a collection of essays by Smith, an associate professor of English and interim director of the Delta State Honors Program.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo project of mine has meant or could mean more to me, and I am so grateful to WTAW Press for giving the book a home,\u201d said Smith. \u201cThe essays deal with my first wife’s illness and death, four months after giving birth to our second child and the similar diagnosis and recovery of my stepdaughter three years later. The book begins with the odd coincidence that my first copy of my first wife’s book happened to arrive in the mail on the very day of my stepdaughter’s diagnosis.\u201d<\/p>\n
WTAW Press is the publishing arm of a longstanding reading series with locations in major cities across the country, so in addition to the book launch in September in San Francisco, Smith will be invited to read at the other locations over the next year and a half.<\/p>\n
Additionally, Smith has published three collections of poetry, including \u201cMultiverse,\u201d a collection of two anagrammatic cycles. His translation of the first part of Goethe\u2019s Faust was published by Shearsman Books in 2012, and he is co-editor of the anthology, \u201cThe Mint’s Invitation: Contemporary Chinese Short-Shorts in Translation,\u201d forthcoming from Columbia University Press in the fall of 2017.<\/p>\n
Together with software engineer Brandon Nelson, Smith created and curates The Zombie Poetry Project. The project is an experiment in machine-assisted composition. Smith\u2019s 500-line poem, \u201cZombie Ride-Along,\u201d which is published on the site, operates as the source text for the project.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe invite visitors to input any English-language text into the field provided,\u201d said Smith. \u201cUsing a set of language tools, this text will be syntactically matched with sections of the 500-line source poem to produce a new \u2018zombified\u2019 poem of random lineation.<\/p>\n