Donna E. Smyth
Acadia University
Donna E. Smyth lives on an old farm in Hants County, Nova Scotia. She has published two novels, Quilt and Subversive Elements, as well as numerous short stories, including Among the Saints, poems and non-fiction pieces. Her novel for young adults, Loyalist Runaway, won the 1992 Dartmouth Library Fiction Award.
Smyth has also worked as a playwright with Mermaid Theatre for Young Audiences, originally based in Wolfville, N.S. Her one-woman play celebrating the life and work of the poet Elizabeth Bishop, Running to Paradise, was produced by the Studio Group in Wolfville and Halifax in 1998 and published by Gaspereau Press in 1999.
Her two-act play, Sole Survivors, was produced by the Ship’s Company Theatre in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, in 2000 and published by Broken Jaw Press in 2003.
She is the founding editor of Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal and teaches English and Creative Writing at Acadia University, Wolfville, NS.
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Selected Stories
By Donna E. Smyth
January 2004
“Donna E. Smyth – adventures with words; she is always doing something new and unique. Beginning with her visceral morality, her stories are startling, nerve wracking, provocative: she combines Angela Carter’s beautiful style with Patricia Highsmith’s malevolent atmospheres. Smyth shatters clichés and dismisses mere sociology. She knows that pleasure is besieged by terror. She tells us what we don’t want to know, but need to know. Smyth’s writing disturbs us, enrichingly, because truth can never be at peace with language.” –George Elliott Clarke, author of Execution Poems
