Katy Simpson Smith is the author of the novels The Story of Land and Sea, a Vogue best book of the year; Free Men; The Everlasting, a New York Times best historical novel of the year; The Weeds, a New Yorker best book of the year; and The Maltese Version, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. She received a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and is also the author of We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750–1835. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Paris Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Oxford American, and Granta, among other publications. She was a 2025–2026 fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and teaches in the Bennington Writing Seminars. Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, she lives in New Orleans.
