Crystal Simone Smith is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Routes Home, and Running Music. She is also the author of Wildflowers: Haiku, Senryu, and Haibun. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Callaloo, Nimrod, Barrow Street, Obsidian II: Literature in the African Diaspora, African American Review, and Mobius: The Journal of Social Change. She is an alumna of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and the Yale Summer Writers Conference. She holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband and two sons where she teaches English composition and creative writing. She is the managing editor of Backbone Press.