Erin Elizabeth Smith is the author of three full-length collections, The Naming of Strays (Gold Wake 2011) and The Fear of Being Found, which was re-released by Zoetic Press in 2016. Her third collection, DOWN was released from Stephen F. Austin State University Press in 2020.

Smith's poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Guernica, Ecotone, Mid-American, the Los Angeles Review, Florida Review, and Tupelo Quarterly, among others. She earned her PhD in Creative Writing from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi and is now a Distinguished Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Tennessee where she creative writing, crowdfunding, and a variety of literature classes including Women in American Literature and Queer Poetics at the University of Tennessee.

Smith currently lives in Oak Ridge, TN where she is the Executive Director for Sundress Publications and the Sundress Academy for the Arts at Firefly Farms. She is also the founding editor of Best of the Net and Stirring.

In spring of 2022, Smith was named the inaugural Poet Laureate of Oak Ridge, TN.