William Jay Smith (April 22, 1918 – August 18, 2015) was an American poet. He was appointed the nineteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1968 to 1970.
William Jay Smith was born in Winnfield, Louisiana. He was brought up at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, south of St. Louis. Smith received his A.B. and M.A. from Washington University in St. Louis and continued his studies at Columbia University. Smith later attended Wadham College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and continued his education at the University of Florence.
In 1947 he married the poet Barbara Howes and they lived for a time in England and Italy. They had two sons, David Smith and Gregory. They divorced in the mid-1960s.
Smith was a poet in residence at Williams College from 1959 to 1967 and taught at Columbia University from 1973 until 1975. He served as the Professor Emeritus of English literature at Hollins University. He was the first Native American named to the position of Poet Laureate in the United States.
As of 2008, he lived in houses located in both Cummington, Massachusetts, and Paris, France.
Smith was the author of ten collections of poetry of which two were finalists for the National Book Award.
He had been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1975.
His work appeared in Harper's Magazine, The New York Review of Books,
Celebration at Dark. Farrar, Straus. 1950.
The Tin Can and Other Poems. Delacorte Press. 1966.
His Collected Poems: 1939–1989. C. Scribner's Sons. 1990. ISBN 978-0-684-19167-6.
The World Below the Window: Poems, 1937–1997. Johns Hopkins University Press. 1998. ISBN 978-0-8018-6783-5. reprint 2002
The Cherokee Lottery: A Sequence of Poems. Curbstone Press (original from the University of Michigan). 2000.
Laughing Time. Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence. 1955. ISBN 978-0-440-05534-1. {{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help) reprint 1980
Boy Blue's Book of Beasts. Little, Brown. 1957.
Typewriter Town. Dutton. 1960. ISBN 0-620-11193-3. {{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
Ho for a Hat!. Joy Street Books. 1964. ISBN 978-0-316-80120-1. {{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help) rev. ed., 1989
Laughing Time: Collected Nonsense. Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence. 1980. ISBN 978-0-440-05534-1.