Smith, Patricia Clark 1943-

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SMITH, Patricia Clark 1943-

PERSONAL: Born February 14, 1943, in Holyoke, MA; daughter of James Joseph (a project engineer) and Rita Mary (a homemaker; maiden name, Dunn) Clark; married Warren S. Smith, August 25, 1964 (divorced, 1976); married John F. Crawford (a college professor and publisher), November 26, 1988; children: (first marriage) Joshua Briggs, Caleb Michael. Ethnicity: "Irish-French-Canadian-Micmac." Education: Smith College, B.A., 1964; Yale University, M.A., 1965, Ph.D., 1970. Politics: "Leftist; registered Green Party." Religion: Roman Catholic.

ADDRESSES: Home—2309 Headingly NW, Albuquerque, NM 87107. Office—c/o Department of English, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131; fax: 505-345-5729.

CAREER: Smith College, Northampton, MA, lecturer in English, 1968-69; Luther College, Decorah, IA, assistant professor of English, 1969-71; University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, assistant professor, 1971-82, associate professor, 1982-96, professor of English, 1996-2002, professor emeritus, 2002—.

MEMBER: Phi Beta Kappa.

WRITINGS:

Talking to the Land (poetry), Blue Moon (Tucson, AZ), 1979.

Changing Your Story (poetry), West End (Albuquerque, NM), 1990.

(Editor, with Paul Davis, Gary Harrison, David Johnson, and husband, John F. Crawford) Western Literature in a World Context (anthology), two volumes, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1995, 2nd edition published as The Bedford Anthology of World Literature, six volumes, 2003.

(With Paula Gunn Allen) As Long As the Rivers Flow: The Stories of Nine Native Americans, Scholastic (New York, NY), 1996.

(Reteller, with Michael B. Running Wolf) On the Trail of Elder Brother: Glous'gap Stories of the Micmac Indians, illustrated by Michael B. RunningWolf, Persea Books (New York, NY), 2000.

Weetamoo, Heart of the Pocassets (novel), Scholastic (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to books, including The Sacred Hoop, edited by Paula Gunn Allen; Working Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory; To Speak or Be Silent: The Paradox of Disobedience in the Lives of Women; This Is about Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers; and Western Women: Their Land, Their Lives. Contributor of short stories and reviews to New American Review, Tierra: Contemporary Short Fiction of New Mexico, American Indian Quarterly, Rio Grande Writers'Newsletter, and Western American Literature.

WORK IN PROGRESS: The Road to White Tail, a young adult novel set on the Mescalero Apache reservation in 1915.

SIDELIGHTS: Patricia Clark Smith once commented: "I was born on Valentine's Day, 1943, in Holyoke, Massachusetts. My family on both sides is French-Canadian, Irish, and Micmac Indian. I'm a mixed-blood person, and the more diverse that places are (like New Mexico), the more I feel at home there.

"When I was growing up in Massachusetts and Maine, my family told me stories, taught me the names of the birds and plants that grew around our house, and talked to me about what was happening in the world. They read to me all the time, and I became a hungry reader of everything from Little Women to horror comics. I made my first book when I was seven, writing the story, drawing the pictures, and sewing the pages together.

"In 1964 I graduated from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where my maternal grandmother had worked as a maid. I was the first person in my family to go to college, and often it was scary because I knew so many people were counting on me to do well. I wanted to be a writer and English professor, so I went on to Yale University, where I specialized in American literature.

"In 1971 I was hired by the University of New Mexico. I was soon asked to teach some of my classes onsite at different places on the Navajo Reservation. A lot of wonderful books by American Indian novelists and poets were being published, and I began to teach those books and publish articles about them. There was no such thing as Native American studies when I was in school, but now it is a respected field. My Native American literature classes are crowded every semester.

"Some of my Native American students, like Paula Gunn Allen, have gone on to become well-known writers. Paula and I have worked on scholarly articles together before, but As Long As the Rivers Flow: The Stories of Nine Native Americans is the first young people's book for both of us. Scholastic asked Paula to do the book, and she invited me to join her. We loved telling those stories! It was very important, we thought, to make readers aware of the range of Native American achievement. Some of the people we wrote about in the book are barely known, even though they were very important. Weetamoo, the Pocasset woman sachem and warrior, is a good example. She avoided war when she could, but when it became plain to her in the 1670s that the English colonists were making native ways of life impossible, she fought bravely beside Metacom (or King Philip, as the English called him) and gave the colonists a run for their money. She's my personal heroine. Now I've done a whole novel about her life as an adolescent, Weetamoo, Heart of the Pocassets.

"When I am not teaching or writing, I love to hang out with our nine cats, to tend my little outdoor fish pond, to cook, and to garden. My husband and I enjoy driving around the southwest and seeking different historical sights that aren't in the guidebooks, like the site of the ranch of John Chisum, the cattle rancher who knew Billy the Kid.

"Michael RunningWolf, a Micmac storyteller, and I have recently published a collection of traditional Micmac stories about Glous'gap, the great hero of our people. It was very well received by Micmac elders.

"My next book is set on the Mescalero Apache Reservation in southern New Mexico in 1915. In it, my young heroine learns about native plant medicine from her grandmother. This means doing a lot of the kind of research I love best, and right now my desk is piled high with books of Apache history and ethnology and books about native plants and their medicinal uses."

More recently Smith added: "Since I 'retired' in May, 2002, I've taught in a summer Native studies institute in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada, learned how to make and preserve chutney, and helped to produce a production of The Wizard of Oz put on by differently-abled adults at an Albuquerque community center."