Dinitia Smith

Dinitia Smith was born in Cumberland, Maryland, and raised primarily in Great Britain, where her father was a journalist. She came to the United States in 1959, and lived in New York City and Westchester. After graduating from Smith College,[1] she worked as a reporter for the Associated Press in New York.[2] She enrolled in the New York University Film School, and in 1971 obtained a Masters of Fine Arts. That year, she wrote and directed her first film, Passing Quietly Through, under her then-married name McCarthy.[3] That film was one of the first films by a woman to be chosen for the New York Film Festival. Smith continued to make documentaries, including some with American documentary filmmaker, David Grubin,[4] and also wrote several screenplays.[5] Her films have been shown at the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art.[6]

In 1975, Smith won an Emmy Award for a film she made for WNBC – TV.[7] She published her first novel, The Hard Rain, in 1980. Her second novel, Remember This, won her fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts[8] and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.[9] Her short fiction has been published in numerous literary journals.[10][11]

Smith was also a contributing editor at New York magazine;[12] from 1995 to 2006 she worked for The New York Times, where she wrote about arts and intellectual trends and ideas.[13] Her third novel, The Illusionist, published in 1997, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.[14] The Honeymoon, her biographical novel about the 19th century writer George Eliot, was published in 2016. The New York Times wrote that "Smith's enchanting account humanizes a figure renowned as much for her refutation of conventional female stereotypes and social limitations as for her genius for story and language".[15] A reviewer for the Washington Post called the book "the perfect example of when fictional storytelling about an eminent person is warranted".[16]

Smith has taught at Columbia University and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.[17]

Smith is married to David Nasaw,[18] an author and historian, and the Arthur M. Schlesinger Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has twin sons: Peter Caleb Nasaw (b. 1980), a social worker,[19] and Daniel Nasaw, an editor at The Wall Street Journal.[20][21][22]

• The Hard Rain, Dial Press (1980) ISBN 9780803734098
• Remember This, Henry Holt & Co (1989) ISBN 9780805010367
• The Illusionist, Scribner (1997) ISBN 9780684843292
• The Honeymoon, Other Press (2016) ISBN 9781590517789