Obediah Michael Smith

Obediah Michael Smith was born on New Providence, in The Bahamas, in 1954. He has published 15 books in English: 'Bicentennial Blues', '43 Poems', 'Ice Cubes', 'Acts', 'Fruits from Africa', 'Once Upon a Blank Page', 'As If Creation were His Crime', 'Christmas Lights', 'Poems To Sit On To Shell Peas', 'On The Hinges Of This Town', 'Seventy Poems', 'Open Testament', 'In A China Shop & Other Poems', 'Discovery Daze: 72 Poems' and 'Cutting Teeth'. 'Soul of These Soils Sail of These Seas', released in 1996, is a cassette recording of 155 of his early poems.
Obediah was the Poetry Workshop facilitator for the Bahamas Writers Summers Institute in 2009 and again in 2011. His poems, in English, are included in literary journals and anthologies throughout the Caribbean, in the USA and in England and his poems, translated into Spanish, are included in anthologies in Colombia, in Mexico, in Peru, in Venezuela and in Spain.
At University of Miami and University of the West Indies, Cavehill, Barbados, he participated in writers workshops facilitated by Lorna Goodison, Earl Lovelace, Grace Nichols, Merle Collins, and Mervyn Morris. He attended Memphis State University, 1973 to 1976 and majored in Speech & Drama and Biology. He has a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Dramatics and Speech, from Fisk University. He has lived and has studied French, in Paris, France. At Universidad de Costa Rica, in 2011, he studied Spanish.