Dr. John Smelcer is the award-winning author of over 40 books, published in an eclectic range of interests and disciplines. Aside from John's many novels and poetry collections, he has published books in history, mythology, anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, as well as anthologies, plays, dictionaries, screenplays, and children’s picture books. Ever the interdisciplanarian, his short stories, poems, interviews, and essays -- read by millions -- appear in over 400 magazines and journals worldwide. Smelcer's writing appears in dozens of anthologies of the nation’s foremost Native American writers. His autobiography appears in Here First: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers (Modern Library/Random House, 2000). In 1995, he edited the anthology, Durable Breath: Contemporary Native American Poetry, which was taught at hundreds of colleges and universities across the nation. The anthology included poems by Sherman Alexie, Joy Harjo, James Welch, Diane Glancy, Joseph Bruchac, Simon Ortiz, Linda Hogan, Louise Erdrich, and Jim Barnes. His seminal interview "Towards Defining Native American Literature" appears in Multiethnic Literature of the United States. His novel, The Trap, published in the United States and the United Kingdom, has been hailed an "epic" and a "masterpiece." It won the $10,000 James Jones Prize for the Best First Novel in America (Jones was the author of such classics as From Here to Etenity, Some Came Running, and The Thin Red Line), was named a Notable Book by the New York Public Library, was an American Library Association BBYA Top Ten Pick and a VOYA Top Shelf Selection." Winston Groom (Forrest Gump) wrote, "The Trap is a lovely book, beautifully written." Ray Bradbury called it "Unforgettable!"
Nobelist Elie Wiesel called John's follow-up novel, The Great Death, "Stunning!" Tony Hillerman called it "a small miracle." The Great Death is being adapted into a screenplay. His novel, Edge of Nowhere, was published in the United Kingdom and named one of the "Best Books of 2010." Pulitzer Prize winner Frank McCourt (Angela's Ashes) said it has "more psychological depth than Robinson Crusoe." Both books were selected for England's National Literacy Trust. Smelcer's Alaska Native myths appear in The Last New Land (Alaska Northwest Books, 1996), a collection of the greatest Alaskan literature of all time. John’s stories are included in the volume alongside Jack London, Robert Service, Louis L’Amour, and James Michener (who, along with John Gardner and Joseph Campbell, personally encouraged John to become a writer). His book on Alaska Native mythology, The Raven and The Totem, now in its 15th printing and with over 50,000 copies in print, features a foreword by Joseph Campbell, who helped George Lucas create the archetypal stories and characters in Star Wars. Before writing a single word of any of his novels, John brainstorms the concepts with his friend, Dave Collins. Somewhat of a reclusive hermit, Dave has lived in a tent in the woods of Alaska for fifteen years. It is an important friendship to John. Over 20 years, many of John's stories, poems, and books have been illustrated by Larry Vienneau.
Dr. John Smelcer is one of the last speakers on earth of the Ahtna Athabaskan language, an endangered Alaska Native language. Only 20 or so elders, all 30-50 years older than John, still speak the language. He is one of only a few people who read and write in Ahtna. If nothing changes, when John Smelcer dies, so too will the Ahtna language. John is also one of only a handful of Native speakers of Alutiiq, a neighboring yet unrelated Alaska Native language from the Prince William Sound region. It too is extremely endangered. One of John's mentors was the legendary MIT linguist, Ken Hale, who spoke over 50 languages and advocated for the linguistic training of cultural insiders. As with his work with Ahtna, John studied Alutiiq with every living elder who spoke the language over a four year period. John Smelcer is the editor-compiler of dictionaries of both languages, the author of numerous articles and encyclopedia entries, and a scholarly book chapter on "The Origins of Native American Languages," making him one of the world's foremost scholars of Alaska Native/Native American languages. John regularly publishes in the Ahtna language. Ahtna tribal members from across the nation regularly thank John for making the Ahtna Noun Dictionary freely available to them. One of John's bilingual poems is on permament display at Chicago's Brookfield Zoo as part of its world Language Conservation Project. In April 2011, Harvard University recorded John reading his bilingual poems as part of the same archive collection that houses T. S. Eliot reading "The Wasteland." The National Park Service occassionally consults John about issues of cultural and linguistic history of national parks in Alaska.
Many of America’s greatest writers and scholars collaborate with Dr. John Smelcer, including John Updike with The Binghamton Poems , Nobelist Saul Bellow and Ursula K. LeGuin with Stealing Indians, Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker with The Complete Ahtna Poems and The Ahtna Noun Dictionary, Carl Sagan with Tracks, folklorist Barre Tolken with What We Leave Behind, Gary Snyder with In the Shadows of Mountains, Denise Levertov and Allen Ginsberg with Songs from an Outcast, Michael Dorris, James Welch, James Dickey, and J. D. Salinger with ALASKAN: Stories from the Last Great Land, and Ted Hughes (Sylvia Plath's ex-husband) with Raven Speaks. (Incidentally, John was friends with Nicholas Hughes, the son of Hughes and Sylvia Plath, before his death in Fairbanks, Alaska in March 2009.) With Noam Chomsky, Harvard University Professor Steven Pinker, the leading cognitive psychologist in the world and author of The New York Times best-seller, The Language Instinct generously provided a foreword to The Ahtna Noun Dictionary. It was after meeting Chomsky that Smelcer began working on his Ahtna Noun Dictionary. The Dalai Lama graciously provided a foreword to The Alutiiq Noun Dictionary. During the last years of his life, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Norman Mailer developed a literary friendship with John, who was faculty in a graduate creative writing program in which Mailer was associated and where his son, Michael Mailer, was also faculty. John edited and published two of Mailer's poems in Rosebud, as well as his acceptance speech for the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Award Foundation. In exchange, Mailer edited one of John's novels. In the fall of 2006, a year before he passed away, John visited his friend in Provincetown. In a bit of irony, John gave a talk about creative writing in Frank McCourt's high school English class in Brooklyn the year before he published Angela's Ashes, which won the Pulitzer Prize! McCourt kindly edited John's novel, Edge of Nowhere months before his death in July 2009. Along with a playwright friend, John used to visit Tom O’Horgan in his loft in Manhattan. Tom was best known for directing the 1970s Broadway hit musicals Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. In 1996, on the 25th anniversary of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), John and former Alaska Federation of Natives president Emil Notti, provided forewords to Robert Rude's An Act of Deception, a landmark book that examined the negative impact of the Act on Alaska Native peoples. While lecturing in Australia in the fall of 1995, Prof. Smelcer gave a talk on writing craft with Arthur Miller.
Dr. John Smelcer's writing has been nominated for dozens of literary awards, and has won many of them, most recently The $10,000 James Jones Prize, a prestigious award for the best first novel in the nation; the Kessler Prize for the best book of poetry published in America by a poet over 40; the James Hearst Prize for Poetry; the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Poetry; and Without Reservation was a finalist for the Western Writers of America Award for poetry in 2004. His books have been contenders for almost every major American literary award, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the American Library Association Book Award, The National Book Critics Circle Award, The Story Prize, as well as dozens of other awards, including numerous nominations for the Pushcart Prize and the National Literacy Booktrust Award (UK). One of John's poems received an honorable mention for the 2010 Academy of American Poets Prize. In the past decade, John has twice served as a Nominator for the $500,000 MacArthur Foundation Genius Fellowships. With Jack Zipes, John co-authored "The Story-Telling Instinct: Why Fairy Tales Stick." With Seth Lerer, John co-authored "Beowulf and the English Literary Tradition." With Joel Gardner, John co-authored "Thirty Years Later: A Conversation on John Gardner." With Donald Pease and Robyn Wiegman, John co-authored ""American Studies at a Crossroads." With X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, he co-authored "The Future of Poetry in America." With American Book Award winner, James Welch, he co-authored "The Rise (and Fall) of American Indian Literature." As a Cambridge and Oxford-educated Shakespearean, Professor Smelcer's research pushed back the historical origins of Measure for Measure decades earlier than scholars previously thought. With Lucille Clifton, who he met at the 2006 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, he co-authored "Identity, Multigenrism, and the Historicity of Jean Toomer's Cane," a reexamination of that seminal book and the rise of the Harlem Renaissance. John's friend and supporter, Lee Francis, Paula Gunn Allen's brother and founder of the Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, wrote his controversial essay, "Are you a Real Live Indian?" in response to the way some people mistreated John Smelcer, one of the earliest members of the organization. John Smelcer is the author of a dozen articles on College English pedagogy spanning two decades. Over the decades, John has performed his poetry at hundreds of venues around the world, including at the Smithsonian's Museum of the American Indian in NYC and The Gorky Institute in Moscow, Russia. Along with Sherman Alexie, John was a participant at the 2nd "Returning the Gift" Conference of Native American Writers, held in Neah Bay, WA.
Since 1995, Dr. John Smelcer has been associate publisher and poetry editor at Rosebud, one of the premiere literary magazines in America, where he has edited and published work by many of the world’s greatest writers and pop icons, including including Stephen King, John Updike, Frank McCourt, Allen Ginsberg, John Gardner, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Studs Terkel, Jim Morrison, Alice Walker, Gary Snyder, Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, Amiri Baraka, Elie Wiesel, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jewel, Johnny Rzeznik of the Goo Goo Dolls, William Stafford, Norman Mailer, Chinua Achebe, James Dickey, Gwendolyn Brooks, U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine, BJ Thomas, John Denver, Seamus Heaney, Robert Bly, Marge Piercy, Stanley Kunitz, Diane Wakoski, R. Crumb, Sandra Cisneros, Aeronwy Thomas, Richard Wilbur, the Dalai Lama, Pope John Paul II, Star Trek's Leonard Nimoy, and imprisoned Chinese-dissident Liu Xiaobo, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Poems published in Rosebud have been selected for The Best American Poetry. Few poetry editors have led a national magazine for so many years. Rosebud is a 501 c3 nonprofit. It receives no regular funding from any outside institution or agency. We need your financial support. Donations are tax deductible. Before Rosebud, John was poetry editor at Seattle-based The Raven Chronicles. Throughout the 1990s, John owned a successful independent publishing company. Dr. John Smelcer and Tobias Wolff have the distinction of being the only two fiction writers to have their stories appear in Powder, one of the world's premiere skiing magazines. In 2004, John worked with Michael Jackson to edit Michael's collected lyrics/poems for a book. Although John contacted Mr. Jackson's estate after his death, the project unfortunately has not been resumed. Carl Sagan, Sean Penn, Michael Dorris and John Denver spent time in Alaska with John.
John's essay on compassion appears alongside an essay by the Dalai Lama in Parabola magazine. Indeed, in 2011 John co-authored a poem with the Dalai Lama. For over a decade, John Smelcer was co-judge of the National Poetry Book Award with poets Allen Ginsberg, James Dickey, John Updike, Denise Levertov, X. J. Kennedy, Donald Justice, Thom Gunn, Stanley Kunitz and David Ignatow. Of the many books John selected as winner, Denise Duhamel's The Woman With Two Vaginas was his favorite. John Smelcer is the co-founder of several major American literary awards, including the William Stafford Prize for Poetry, the Dylan Thomas American Poet Prize (with Aeronwy Thomas), The X. J. Kennedy Prize for Nonfiction, The Mary Shelley Prize for Fiction, and the John Gardner Prize for Playwriting. In 2010, John Smelcer invited legendary icon Bob Dylan to co-judge the Dylan Thomas American Poet Prize (Bob Dylan aka Robert Zimmerman, took Dylan Thomas' name as his stage name). Smelcer also collaborated with three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Edward Albee to (unsuccessfully) establish the Edward Albee Prize for Playwriting. Throughout the many years he has served as poetry editor at Rosebud and as co-judge with William Stafford of the National Poetry Book Award, John estimates that he has received and read a staggering 400,000 poems! Growing up in Alaska since the 1960s was very exciting for John. Over the years, he has been attacked by bears and wolves (He has the scars to prove it. In the spring of 2010, a young woman was killed and eaten by a pack of wolves in Alaska.), has climbed many of Alaska's mountains, traversed many of its countless glaciers (he even rescued his brother who once fell into a crevasse), has been marooned on an island without survival gear, has been stalked by a polar bear, has rescued moose calves from raging rivers, and in October 1988, he participated in a rescue to save grey whales, which had been stranded when the shifting polar ice pack trapped them near Pt. Barrow. Drew Barrymore made a movie about it. Much of John's writing is based on these life events. He's even eaten wholly mammoth. "Indeed, John Smelcer is often hailed as the modern day Jack London."
John has often been the keynote speaker at university commencements. For his life-long work in ethnic American studies and ethnic American literature, Baruch College of Manhattan, the most ethnically diverse college in America, asked John to deliver the keynote address at their fall 2009 Convocation. Dr. John Smelcer was the Clifford D. Clark Fellow of English and creative writing at Binghamton University, the honors campus of State University of New York, where he was named one of the university's most interesting, inspirational, and remarkable professors. In March 2010, John received an Award for Excellence in Research. In 2010, University of Alaska Fairbanks alumni nominated John for the university's Distinguished Alumni Award. Few scholars have lectured or published so widely on the issue of ethnic identity than John Smelcer.
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