Dennison Smith is an award winning author and curator. Her published works include novels, The Eye of the Day (Harpers Collins, Periscope) and Scavenger (Insomniac Press), poetry collections, Anon Necessity (Myrical Lyrical) and Fermata (Quattro), and the monograph, The Mestizo Art of Carlos Zapata (Momentum Books).
Dennison’s writings interlink literary mediums and bring nature to the status of protagonist. Critics have described her writing as ‘equally beautiful and harsh’ (Globe & Mail) with ‘the talent to explore all corners of human and natural existence from the perspective of the heart’ (Winnipeg Free Press).
She has recently completed her latest novel, The Westward Hours, following three generations of women through the environmental and geopolitical devastation of Climate Change.
Dennison is also a weaver, and was founder and creative director of The Baldwin (London, England), curating dialogue between arts, cultures and nature. The Baldwin specializes in representing contemporary fine art by indigenous North American artists, whose lands and communities stand at the front-line of environmental and social issues.
She holds a BS in Performance Studies with highest honours from Northwestern University (Illinois), an MA in Creative Writing with distinction from University of East Anglia (UK), and a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from University of East Anglia.
Originally from Chicago, after many years in England, she has returned to splitting her time between a small island in Canada, and her home outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Please send professional queries to [email protected].
The Eye of The Day
It begins with an explosion.In a small American town in the 1930s, Amos a quiet giant of a man with a heroic spirit and a troubled past is partly blinded in a locomotive accident. Aubrey, a sheltered boy of eleven whose patrician New England family employs Amos as a handyman, rushes to his aid. As though heralding the twentieth century s worst cataclysm, this disaster inaugurates an epic story of war, friendship, synchronicity, courage and despair. Over the next ten years, in the mountains and forests of North America and on the bloody battlefields of Europe, Amos s and Aubrey s trajectories will converge mysteriously. Although they inhabit very different worlds, these chance meetings deepen their bond each time, and will shape each of their lives in profound ways....
Available as UK version, USA and Harper Collins Canada
Scavenger
In this haunting first novel, a young girl, growing up in an American suburb, collects the wings of dead birds and dreams of flying. Her mind is filled with stories of the generations of strong Irish women who came before her as she faces her parents: a mother lost in alcohol, a father deaf to any sound except his beloved opera records. At thirteen, she runs away from her mother’s shrieks and her father’s silence, travelling west into the desert, following the path her Irish grandmother travelled over a hundred years before.....
Available USA, UK, and from Insomniac Press Canada.
Fermata
‘The poetry of Fermata, like the pause or hold in music which the word signifies, conjures the audible spaces between notes and the suspended moment. As the author puts it, this is “terse but lateral but lyrical writing.” Her words “are always on the threshold of becoming solid entities. In Fermata, the pitched sound, held indefinitely or paused indefinitely, is the mind feeling the restless body, the migrations of geese or memory.”’
Published by Quattro Press, Toronto, Canada, 2012. Cover art by Paris-based artist, Alexandra Roussopoulos. Copies available through Amazon Canada, Quattro Press and at Q Space on College Street, Toronto. (Buying direct helps to support small presses.)
available for purchase here