Emily Louise Smith

A YWCA Woman of Achievement in the Arts, a recipient of UNCW’s Innovation in Teaching Award, and a finalist for Wilma magazine’s Women to Watch Awards

Emily Louise Smith is an associate professor of creative writing and publishing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she directs The Publishing Laboratory and teaches Introduction to Book Publishing, Bookbuilding, Book Marketing and Publicity, Publishing Process, Writing for Grants and Fellowships, the Art of Literary Gathering, and the Publishing Practicum, among other special topics. Her courses demystify publishing processes and afford students opportunities to engage in decision-making as they examine and reimagine the field.

She is publisher of the award-winning sister literary imprints Lookout Books, which she co-founded in 2009, and Ecotone, for which she also served as designer or art director from 2005 through 2017. Under her leadership, Lookout titles have won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Paterson Fiction Prize, and have been named finalists for the National Book Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among many others.

Her writing subjects range from the history and practice of independent publishing to explorations of parenthood, adoption, donor conception, and reproductive ethics. Her work appears in Outside, House Method, the Southern Review, Boulevard, Best New Poets, Salt, and Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (Milkweed), among other publications. Her honors include a 2023 Artist Support Grant from the Arts Council of Wilmington and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, as well as fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hambidge, and the Hub City Writers Project, among many others.

She lives in Wilmington, NC, and is working on a researched memoir about family—from adoption before Roe v. Wade to donor siblings.