About the Author

Larry Smith is a native of Mingo Junction, Ohio, in Appalachia�s Panhandle region of the Ohio River Valley. Smith has worked as a steel mill laborer, a high school teacher, a college professor, and a writer and editor. A graduate of Mingo Central High School, Muskingum College, and Kent State University, he is the author of seven books of poetry, a book of memoirs, two books of fiction, two biographies of authors Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Patchen, and two books of translations from the Chinese. Now a professor emeritus of Bowling Green State University�s Firelands College, he is the director of the Firelands Writing Center there and of Bottom Dog Press. Smith has received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council, and a Fulbright Lectureship in American Literature to Italy. The author is a requested speaker on creative writing, publishing, American Transcendental writers, Zen Buddhist writings, and working-class literature. Smith is the father of three adult children, and is married to Ann Smith a family counselor and professor emerita of Nursing at the Toledo University of Ohio. This is an autobiographical novel.

Reviews

The Long Winding River, Larry Smith's latest novel, traces the growth of the McCall family tree from rural Southern Ohio to the industrial Ohio River Valley. Andrew McCall, orphaned by the Civil War, is the tap root of the family. Wild and conflicted, he brings sons into the world who bring sons into the world who bring sons again, each as trapped by the McCall ancestry as he is buoyed by it. This novel is untamed at times, tender at times, and at all times, truthful and deeply human. -Jeff Vande Zande, author of Landscape with Fragmented Figures